Carl Sagan Quotes

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

Frederick Douglas taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.

But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.

In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

Those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.

The visions we offer our children shape the future.

The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood

The Cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be.

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

Not all bits have equal value.

There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.

First rule in government spending: why build one when you can have two at twice the price?

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

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.

Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence

We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.

Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition.

The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.

If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.

There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.

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.

You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.

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

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.

We can't help it. Life looks for life.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.

One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there's no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

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

We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.

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

We have heard the rationales offered by the nuclear superpowers. We know who speaks for the nations. But who speaks for the human species? Who speaks for Earth?

Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world.

I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It's up to you.

My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.

The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos.

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

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.

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

The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse.