Carl Sagan Quotes
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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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The old man made himself look hard at the Raven and saw that it was not a great bird from the sky but the work of men like himself. This first encounter turned out to be peaceful. The men of the La Pérouse expedition were under strict orders to treat with respect any people they might discover, an exceptional policy for its time and after.
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That it will never come againIs what makes life so sweet.
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For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
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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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In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
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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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Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them.
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Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? … No other human institution comes close.
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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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There is a very stunning range of studies... of interstellar organic matter... the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. ...complex organic materials are everywhere.
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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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For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence.
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The chiliasts made an atheist out of me.
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War is murder writ large.
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If we seek... nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception.
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In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It’s their nature. They can’t help it.
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With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.
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Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.
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It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo's work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.
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For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves. This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.
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Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
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If the press descended, the science would surely suffer.
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'Do you understand what’s going on?''Not at all,' he shouted back. 'I can almost prove this can’t be happening.'