Carl Sagan Quotes

It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand.

[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.

I don't know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you'll be the first to find out.

The desire to be connected with the cosmos reflects a profound reality, but we are connected; not in the trivial ways that astrology promises, but in the deepest ways.

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.

If the press descended, the science would surely suffer.

Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

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

If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.

The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament.)

La prueba de ausencia no es prueba de ausencia

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Our God Is Alive and Well. Sorry About Yours.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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

In that case, on behalf of Earthlife, I urge that, with full knowledge of our limitations, we vastly increase our knowledge of the Solar System and then begin to settle other worlds.

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]

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.

Life is but a momentary glimpse of the wonder of this astounding universe, and it is sad to see so many dreaming it away on spiritual fantasy.

Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value the may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder.

On Titan the molecules that have been raining down like manna from heaven for the last 4 billion years might still be there largely unaltered deep-frozen awaiting the chemists from Earth

We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be.

Observation: I can’t see a thing.Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable and is resisted.

For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other—Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.

If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?

Would not a rational society spend more on understanding and preventing, than on preparing for, the next war?

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

All science asks is to employ the same levels of skepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.

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.

We make our purpose.

And reading itself is an amazing activity: You glance at a thin, flat object made from a tree...and the voice of the author begins to speak inside your head. (Hello!)

the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.

Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of nature.

Our difficulties in understanding or effectuatingcommunication with other animals may arise from our reluctance to grasp unfamiliar ways of dealing with the world.

Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy? What other strong or subtle emotions are felt by animals that do not communicate with us?

Evolution is adventitious and not foresighted. Only through the deaths of an immense number of slightly maladapted organisms are we, brains and all, here today.

Lashley also reported no apparent change in the general behavior of a rat when significant fractions—say 10 percent—of its brain were removed. But no one asked the rat of its opinion.

Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.

Might it be possible at some future time, when neurophysiology has advanced substantially, to reconstruct the memories or insight of someone long dead?...It would be the ultimate breach of privacy.

The price we pay for the anticipation of our future is anxiety about it.

Their position seems to be that their God is so great he doesn't even have to exist.

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

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere.

But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.

All her life, dreams had been her friends. Her dreams were unusually detailed, well-structured, colorful.

To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.

Science gropes and staggers toward improved understanding.

We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?