Sagan Quotes
I do not regard the late Carl Sagan as any kind of authority. On the contrary, as this book will show, I regard him in many ways as a dubious publicity seeker and careerist, more concerned to maintain his reputation as the brilliant and sceptical representative of hard-headed science than to look squarely and honestly at the facts. In short, a bit of a crook.
Colin Wilson
Chaucer shares on the literary stock marker have been rising during the past ten years, owing chiefly to the enthusiasm, literary gifts and scholarship of an Oxford don, Nevill Coghill, and secondarily to the British Broadcasting Corporation. The fluctuations of the literary market are familiar to everyone; sometimes there is a fierce flutter in a virtually unknown commodity (like the John Donne boom in the twenties); occasionally an almost dead commodity bursts in new life (as in the Trollope boom of the forties); Foreign Moderns (Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, Sagan) are eagerly pushed but are apt to collapse suddenly, wiping out those critics who have invested too heavily in them; in the USA the Deep South and Proletarian Anguish are solid, though all else fluctuates unpredictably.
Robertson Davies
Carl Sagan always used to say that when he was trying to explain something to someone, he would go back to that time when he didn't understand it, and then he would retrace his thought steps so that he could make it absolutely clear, and that's one of the infinite number of things I learned from him.
Ann Druyan
Cities are no more artificial than the hives of bees. The Internet is as natural as a spider's web. As Margulis and Sagan have written, we are ourselves technological devices, invented by ancient bacterial communities as means of genetic survival: 'We are a part of an intricate network that comes from the original bacterial takeover of the Earth. Our powers and intelligence do not belong specifically to us but to all life.
John N. Gray
