Words matter. These are the best Carl Sagan Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are as sand, as dust – or less than dust – in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.
We start out a million years ago in a small community on some grassy plain; we hunt animals, have children, and develop a rich social, sexual, and intellectual life, but we know almost nothing about our surroundings.
The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.
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.
We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal’s ‘Pensees’ and read, ‘I am the great silent spaces between worlds.’
The boundary between space and the earth is purely arbitrary. And I’ll probably always be interested in this planet – it’s my favorite.
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.
The professed function of the nuclear weapons on each side is to prevent the other side from using their nuclear weapons. If that’s all it is, then we’ve gotta as: how many nuclear weapons do you need to do that?
Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I’ve had a lot of experience with that.
The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.
Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.
Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.
I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.
No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it’s this world or nothing. That’s a very powerful perception.
There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.
We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.
We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.
For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
