Carl Sagan: Trending quotes

Carl Sagan trending quotes. Read the latest quotes in collection

Carl Sagan: 730 quotes51 likes

“The chiliasts made an atheist out of me.”

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 15 (p. 258)

“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 book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 184

“If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion and politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no place in the endeavor of science.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 91

“Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 173

“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 book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 371

“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 book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 10 (p. 162)

“She too had found the experience transforming. How could she not? A demon had been exorcised. Several. And just when she felt more capable of love than she had ever been, she found herself alone.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 23 (p. 407)

“The old man made himself look hard at the Raven and saw that it was not a great bird from the sky but the work of men like himself. This first encounter turned out to be peaceful. The men of the La Pérouse expedition were under strict orders to treat with respect any people they might discover, an exceptional policy for its time and after.”

Carl Sagan

4 min 40 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Who Speaks for Earth? [Episode 13]

“We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“If we seek… nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“If you take a look at science in its everyday function, of course you find that scientists run the gamut of human emotions and personalities and character and so on. But there’s one thing that is really striking to the outsider, and that is the gauntlet of criticism that is considered acceptable or even desirable. The poor graduate student at his or her Ph. D. oral exam is subjected to a withering crossfire of questions that sometimes seem hostile or contemptuous; this from the professors who have the candidate’s future in their grasp. The students naturally are nervous; who wouldn’t be? True, they’ve prepared for it for years. But they understand that at that critical moment they really have to be able to answer questions. So in preparing to defend their theses, they must anticipate questions; they have to think, “Where in my thesis is there a weakness that someone else might find — because I sure better find it before they do, because if they find it and I'm not prepared, I'm in deep trouble."”

Carl Sagan

Wonder and Skepticism
Skeptical Inquirer
19
1
1995
January-February
0194-6730
http://www.csicop.org/si/show/wonder_and_skepticism/

“There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus… the only planets that we've landed on—are utterly lifeless. …in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“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 book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 9 (p. 154)

“I stress that the universe is made mostly of nothing, that something is the exception.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“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/r2… as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth… have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“This is Phobos… Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos… same story.”

Carl Sagan

The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)

“In some respects, science has far surpassed religion in delivering awe. How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, "This is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant. God must be even greater than we dreamed"? Instead they say, "No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way."”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 50