Carl Sagan quotes - page 5

This image of four spectra is taken from one of Huggins's publications. ...You can see that the Comet Winnecke resembles olive oil more than it does Comet Brorsen. (Carl Sagan)
Something dreadful happens to students between first and twelfth grades, and it's not just puberty.
Carl Sagan
I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said 'billion' many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said 'billions and billions.' For one thing, it's imprecise. How many billions are 'billions and billions'? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? 'Billions and billions' is pretty vague... For a while, out of childish pique, I wouldn't utter the phrase, even when asked to. But I've gotten over that. So, for the record, here it goes: 'Billions and billions.
Carl Sagan
If we like them, they're freedom fighters, she thought. If we don't like them, they're terrorists. In the unlikely case we can't make up our minds, they're temporarily only guerrillas.
Carl Sagan
Do you understand what's going on?” "Not at all,” he shouted back. "I can almost prove this can't be happening.
Carl Sagan
This vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe... has not been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially in no Western religions.
Carl Sagan
If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?
Carl Sagan
The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.
Carl Sagan
Let's see if I've got this straight,” he returned. It was a phrase of hers that he had adopted "It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, and there's this couple lying naked in bed reading the Encyclopaedia Britannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous' than the Resurrection. Do they know how to have a good time or don't they?
Carl Sagan
Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. ...Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r... as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do.
Carl Sagan
This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story. (Carl Sagan)
Cosmos is a Greek word for the order of the universe. It is, in a way, the opposite of Chaos. It implies the deep interconnectedness of all things. It conveys awe for the intricate and subtle way in which the universe is put together.
Carl Sagan
You have to know the past to understand the present.
Carl Sagan
Knowing a great deal is not the same as being smart; intelligence is not information alone but also judgement, the manner in which information is coordinated and used.
Carl Sagan
The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it.
Carl Sagan
We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.
Carl Sagan
we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers.
Carl Sagan
Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.
Carl Sagan
Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.
Carl Sagan
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Carl Sagan
If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read. (Carl Sagan)
The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.
Carl Sagan
If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go.
Carl Sagan
Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.
Carl Sagan
The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.
Carl Sagan