Carl Sagan quotes - page 3

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. They avoid rather than confront the world. But 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. (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
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.
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
Since, in the long run, every planetary society will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring - not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive.
Carl Sagan
But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.
Carl Sagan
We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.
Carl Sagan
We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands.
Carl Sagan
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.
Carl Sagan
The sky calls to us. If we do not destroy ourselves, we will one day venture to the stars.
Carl Sagan
They (i. e., the Pythagoreans) did not advocate the free confrontation of conflicting points of view. Instead, like all orthodox religions, they practised a rigidity that prevented them from correcting their errors. (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
I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
Carl Sagan
You are worth about 3 dollars worth in chemicals.
Carl Sagan
Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.
Carl Sagan
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?
Carl Sagan
With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.
Carl Sagan
It is all a matter of time scale. An event that would be unthinkable in a hundred years may be inevitable in a hundred million.
Carl Sagan
When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.
Carl Sagan
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.
Carl Sagan
It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. (Carl Sagan)
In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.
Carl Sagan
For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.
Carl Sagan
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.
Carl Sagan
Every thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it. Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse.
Carl Sagan