Carl Sagan Quotes: top 100 famous quotes about Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Quotes & Sayings

Happy to read and share the best inspirational Carl Sagan quotes, sayings and quotations on Wise Famous Quotes.

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate ... Choose science. — Carl Sagan

Skepticism does not sell well. — Carl Sagan

But down deep, at the molecular heart of life we're essentially identical to trees. — Carl Sagan

The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths. — Carl Sagan

We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers — Carl Sagan

Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand. — Carl Sagan

All inquires carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions. — Carl Sagan

The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. — Carl Sagan

Venus, it turns out, is broiling hot. There are no swamps, no oil fields, no seltzer oceans. With insufficient data, it is easy to go wrong. — Carl Sagan

It's sometimes easier to reject strong evidence than to admit that we've been wrong, this is information about ourselves worth having. — Carl Sagan

You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility. — Carl Sagan

What an astonishing thing a book is. — Carl Sagan

Black holes collect problems faster than they collect matter. — Carl Sagan

Contemplated as one grand whole, astronomy is the most beautiful monument of the human mind; the noblest record of its intelligence. — Carl Sagan

According to some estimates, almost half the scientists and high technologists on Earth are employed full- or part-time on military matters. — Carl Sagan

Don't judge everyone else by your own limited experience. — Carl Sagan

We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy. — Carl Sagan

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself. — Carl Sagan

There is perhaps no better a demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. — Carl Sagan

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. — Carl Sagan

You have to know the past to understand the present. — Carl Sagan

We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. — Carl Sagan

Who will speak for Planet Earth? — Carl Sagan

The most brilliant youngsters are a national and a global resource. — Carl Sagan

[Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science. — Carl Sagan

Not all bits have equal value. — Carl Sagan

Even victims of atrocious brutality and intractable pain may retain a longing, sometimes even a zest, for life. — Carl Sagan

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves. — Carl Sagan

If there is life, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life.
Mars then, belongs to the Martians, even if they are microbes. — Carl Sagan

The secrets of evolution, are time and death.
There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us. — Carl Sagan

I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space. — Carl Sagan

Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television. — Carl Sagan

If the press descended, the science would surely suffer. — Carl Sagan

Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star. — Carl Sagan

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. — Carl Sagan

In good speaking, should not the mind of the speaker know the truth of the matter about which he is to speak? — Carl Sagan

By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang. — Carl Sagan

Once upon a time, we soared into the Solar System. For a few years. Then we hurried back. Why? What happened? What was 'Apollo' really about? — Carl Sagan

A book is proof humans can do magic. — Carl Sagan

You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe — Carl Sagan

Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship. — Carl Sagan

Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human. — Carl Sagan

Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil. — Carl Sagan

If you want to make a [rhubarb] pie from scratch, first you have to create the universe. — Carl Sagan

The universe forces those who live in it to understand it. — Carl Sagan

We can always take but never give. — Carl Sagan

The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place. — Carl Sagan

We are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are made of star-stuff. There are pieces of star within us all. — Carl Sagan

The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it — Carl Sagan

This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff. — Carl Sagan

Who is really in charge of this planet? — Carl Sagan

Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid. — Carl Sagan

All inquiries carry with them some element of risk. — Carl Sagan

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective. — Carl Sagan

Voltaire argued that if God did not exist Man would be obliged to invent him, and was reviled for the remark. — Carl Sagan

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science. — Carl Sagan

On the day that we do discover that we are not alone, our society may begin to evolve and transform in some incredible and wondrous new ways. — Carl Sagan

Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable. — Carl Sagan

Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe. — Carl Sagan

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. — Carl Sagan

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. — Carl Sagan

We make our purpose. — Carl Sagan

Each time it happens we're tempted to infer the direct intervention of a Maker. — Carl Sagan

But if they called everything divine which they do not understand, why, there would be no end of divine beings. — Carl Sagan

It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men. — Carl Sagan

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. — Carl Sagan

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be. — Carl Sagan

I hold that popularization of science is successful if, at first, it does no more than spark the sense of wonder. — Carl Sagan

Atoms are mainly empty space. Matter is composed chiefly of nothing. — Carl Sagan

[S]cience has itself become a kind of religion. — Carl Sagan

Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science. — Carl Sagan

If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. — Carl Sagan

In the fabric of space and in the nature of matter, as in a great work of art, there is, written small, the artist's signature. — Carl Sagan

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone. — Carl Sagan

The fact that someone says something doesn't mean it's true. Doesn't mean they're lying, but it doesn't mean it's true. — Carl Sagan

Our very existence in that distant time requires that we will have changed our institutions and ourselves. — Carl Sagan

If people knew how many people, especially the very rich and powerful ones, went to psychics, their jaws would drop through the floor, — Carl Sagan

Our perceptions are fallible. We sometimes see what isn't there. We are prey to optical illusions. Occasionally we hallucinate. We are error-prone. — Carl Sagan

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude. — Carl Sagan

Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spendtime wondering why nature is the way it is ... — Carl Sagan

The words "question" and "quest" are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth. — Carl Sagan

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. — Carl Sagan

Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas. — Carl Sagan

We are all stardust — Carl Sagan

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. — Carl Sagan

It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put human face on random cosmic violence. — Carl Sagan

Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven't forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. — Carl Sagan

How can you tell when someone is only imagining? — Carl Sagan

The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies. — Carl Sagan

Everything not forbidden by the laws of nature, he assured her - quoting a colleague down the hall - is mandatory. — Carl Sagan

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky — Carl Sagan

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance. — Carl Sagan

I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work — Carl Sagan

If we go far enough back, any two people on Earth have a common ancestor. — Carl Sagan

Valid criticism does you a favor. — Carl Sagan

If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off. — Carl Sagan

Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species. — Carl Sagan

To live in the hearts of others is to never die in those we leave behind. — Carl Sagan

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous. — Carl Sagan

Predictions of surprising events always prove more accurate if not set down on paper beforehand. — Carl Sagan