Ten long trips around the sun since I last saw that smile, but only joy and thankfulness that on a tiny world in the vastness, for a couple of moments in the immensity of time, we were one.

A lot of people have this ego need that makes them want to believe that Earth is the center of the universe and humans are the most important species, the supreme expression of creation.

If you are searching for sacred knowledge and not just a palliative for your fears, then you will train yourself to be a good skeptic.

And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?

Carl did not want to believe. He wanted to know.

I guess I so desperately want to see us put this planet right. It's so horrifying to me that a fifth of us are starving every night, and that forty thousand children die every single day.

We smoked the way other American families would have wine with dinner. For us, it was our sacrament. It was something that made a great life sweeter in every possible way.

Interviewer: "Didn't [Sagan] want to believe?" Druyan: "He didn't want to believe. He wanted to know.

Science is nothing more than a neverending search for the truth.

Carl took on the military-industrial complex. He campaigned around the world for an end to the production of weapons of mass destruction. To him it was a perversion of science.

People think that if you are a scientist you have to give up that joy of discovery, that passion, that sense of the great romance of life. I say thats completely opposite of the truth.

All that ever holds somebody back, I think, is fear. For a minute I had fear. [Then] I went into the [dressing] room and shot my fear in the face...

Man can only receive what he sees himself receiving.

Our constitution mentions religion just twice, and both times the word 'no' are attached.

The library takes me away from my everyday life and allows me to see other places and learn to understand other people unlike myself.

By the time of the '90s boom, CEOs had become superheroes, accorded celebrity treatment and followed with a kind of slavish scrutiny that Alfred P. Sloan could never have imagined.

Most of us don't collapse into puddles of stress-related disease.

There is only one race, the human race.

The severity of the itch is proportional to the reach.

No matter what sign you were born under, everybody else's horoscope will be more fun than yours.