Carl Sagan Quotes page 6

“Ann Druyan suggests an experiment: Look back again at the pale blue dot of the preceding chapter. Take a good long look at it. Stare at the dot for any length of time and then try to convince yourself that God created the whole Universe for one of the 10 million or so species of life that inhabit that speck of dust. Now take it a step further: Imagine that everything was made just for a single shade of that species, or gender, or ethnic or religious subdivision. If this doesn't strike you as unlikely, pick another dot. Imagine it to be inhabited by a different form of intelligent life. They, too, cherish the notion of a God who has created everything for their benefit. How seriously do you take their claim?”

Referring to an aphorism of Martin Rees. (see Misattributed below)
Source: The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), Ch. 12 : The Fine Art of Baloney Detection, p. 221

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 11

“That it will never come again
Is what makes life so sweet.”

“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.”

Quoting Emily Dickinson; The Poems of Emily Dickinson http://books.google.gr/books?id=LoH2SXEnnoEC&dq=, 3:1171, no. 1741 <br class="br">Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 22 (p. 393)

“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.”

57 min 0 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean [Episode 1]

“Our intelligence and our technology have given us the power to affect the climate. How will we use this power? Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family? Do we value short-term advantages above the welfare of the Earth? Or will we think on longer time scales, with concern for our children and our grandchildren, to understand and protect the complex life-support systems of our planet? The Earth is a tiny and fragile world. It needs to be cherished.”

List of misquotations
Billions and Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millenium (1997)

“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.”

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 103

“Cannabis also enhances the enjoyment of sex — on the one hand it gives an exquisite sensitivity, but on the other hand it postpones orgasm: in part by distracting me with the profusion of image passing before my eyes. The actual duration of orgasm seems to lengthen greatly, but this may be the usual experience of time expansion which comes with cannabis smoking.”

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 3 (p. 55)

“Nobody listens to mathematicians.”

Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)

“A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.”

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 262

“All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value.”

58 min 56 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Traveller's Tales [Episode 6]

““Do you understand what’s going on?”
“Not at all,” he shouted back. “I can almost prove this can’t be happening.””

Cosmos (2011 ebook edition)
Carl Sagan
Random House
2011
July
http://books.google.com/books?id=EIqoiww1r9sC&pg=PT312&dq=%22Not+all+bits+have+equal+value%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yHThUrX4Ns-xoQSIr4DoCQ&ved=0CEAQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22Not%20all%20bits%20have%20equal%20value%22&f=false;

“Astronomically, the U. S. S. R. and the United States are the same place.”

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 19 (p. 330)

“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.”

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 196

“The origin of life happened in significantly less than 500 million years. …Six days was once a popular hypothesis. …A process that happens quickly is a process that is in some sense likely… this evidence suggests that the origin of life was in some sense easy, in some sense sitting in the laws of physics and chemistry.”

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 332

“There is a very stunning range of studies… of interstellar organic matter… the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. …complex organic materials are everywhere.”

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

“Imagine how different our world would be if those discoveries had been explained and used for the benefit of everyone, if the humane perspective of Eratosthenes had been widely adopted and applied. But this was not to be. Alexandria was the greatest city the Western world had ever seen. People from all nations came here to live to trade to learn, on a given day these harbours were thronged with merchants and scholars and tourists, it's probably here that the word Cosmopolitan realised its true meaning of a citizen not just of a nation but of the Cosmos, to be a citizen of the Cosmos. Here were clearly the seeds of our modern world, but why didn't they take root and flourish why instead did the Western world slumber through a 1000 years of darkness until Columbus and Copernicus and their contemporaries rediscovered the work done here? I cannot give you a simple answer but I do know this, there is no record in the entire history of the library that any of the illustrious scholars and scientists who worked here ever seriously challenged a single political or economic or religious assumption of the society in which they lived. The permanence of the stars was questioned, the justice of slavery was not.”

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

“Instead of wanting everyone to share and know of their discoveries the Pythagoreans suppressed the square root of two and the dodecahedron. The outside world was not to know. The Pythagoreans had discovered, in the mathematical underpinnings of nature, one of the two most powerful scientific tools, the other of course is experiment, but instead of using their insight to advance the collective voyage of human discovery they made of it little more than the hocus-pocus of a mystery cult. Science and mathematics were to be removed from the hands of the merchants and the artisans.”

28 min 30 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Who Speaks for Earth? [Episode 13]

“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.”

38 min 10 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]

“If the press descended, the science would surely suffer.”

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

“In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.”

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 5 (p. 75)

“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.”

0 min 45 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), Encyclopedia Galactica [Episode 12]

“With insufficient data it is easy to go wrong.”

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 73

“Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.”

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 94

“Many harebrained interpretations were also widely available, especially in weekly newspapers.”

Emmett F. Fields, in "Atheism : An Affirmative View" (1980) http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/emmett_fields/affirmative_atheism.html <br class="br">Misattributed

“The enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.”

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 13 (p. 216)

“Humans are good, she knew, at discerning subtle patterns that are really there, but equally so at imagining them when they are altogether absent.”

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

“In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.”

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 3 (p. 44)