Carl Sagan Quotes

Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.

He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.

Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different worlds and asking the same kind of question?

If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone?

What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.

My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what we sometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.

Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.

Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species.

Some 5 billion years from now, there will be a last perfect day on Earth... then the sun will begin to die, life will be extinguished, the oceans will boil and evaporate away.

There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions.

Science is a collaborative enterprise, spanning the generations. When it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way - seeing for them also.

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

It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.

Science is only a Latin word for knowledge

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

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

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

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.

We are all star stuff.

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

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

It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

But I could be wrong.

As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.

War is murder writ large.

Extraordinary claim requires extraordinary proof.

How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?

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

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

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 . . .

Real patriots ask questions.

All colours are arbitrary.

We can always take but never give.

There is in this Universe much of what seems to be design.

The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]

The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.

Books tap the wisdom of our species -- the greatest minds, the best teachers -- from all over the world and from all our history. And they're patient.

Extraordinary observations require extraordinary evidence to make them believable.

The illegality of cannabis is outrageous.

You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals.

All inquiries carry with them some element of risk.

Valid criticism does you a favor.

We are the custodians of life's meaning.

Science is a way of thinking that helps you not to fool yourself.

With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.

Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.

I'm only a four-dimensional creature. Haven't got a clue how to visualise infinity. Even Einstein hadn't. I know because I asked him

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

The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.