Carl Sagan Quotes
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Suppose your father... walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week.
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I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgment until the evidence is in.
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Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
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There is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. ...such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. ...Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious premise of heaven affords.
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In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
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Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that.
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We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it's forever.
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If a marker were to be erected today, it might read, in homage to his scientific courage: 'He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions.'
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Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it's not just puberty.
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Astronomically, the U. S. S. R. and the United States are the same place.
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Every thinking person fears nuclear war and every technological nation plans for it. Everyone knows it's madness, and every country has an excuse.
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Science is ... a way of skeptically interrogating the universe with a fine understanding of human fallibility. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan, political or religious, who comes ambling along.'
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If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
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A googolplex is precisely as far from infinity as is the number 1... no matter what number you have in mind, infinity is larger still.
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A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.
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I think people in power have a vested interest to oppose critical thinking.
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No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it's this world or nothing. That's a very powerful perception.
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This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story.
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This image of four spectra is taken from one of Huggins's publications. ...You can see that the Comet Winnecke resembles olive oil more than it does Comet Brorsen.
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We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.
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The history of science-especially physics-has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance...
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The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.
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The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
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Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them.