Carl Sagan Quotes
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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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The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.
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That it will never come againIs what makes life so sweet.
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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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If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.
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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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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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For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
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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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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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This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story.
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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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The chiliasts made an atheist out of me.
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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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War is murder writ large.
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With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.
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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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In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It’s their nature. They can’t help it.
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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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'Do you understand what’s going on?''Not at all,' he shouted back. 'I can almost prove this can’t be happening.'
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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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The neurochemistry of the brain is astonishingly busy, the circuitry of a machine more wonderful than any devised by humans. But there is no evidence that its functioning is due to anything more than the 10
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We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system.