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Carl Sagan Quotes
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Carl Edward Sagan was an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known as a science popularizer and communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the now accepted hypothesis that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to and calculated using the greenhouse effect.Sagan published more than 600 scientific papers and articles and was author, co-author or editor of more than 20 books. He wrote many popular science books, such as The Dragons of Eden, Broca's Brain and Pale Blue Dot, and narrated and co-wrote the award-winning 1980 television series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. The most widely-watched series in the history of American public television, Cosmos has been seen by at least 500 million people across 60 different countries. The book Cosmos was published to accompany the series. He also wrote the science fiction novel Contact, the basis for a 1997 film of the same name. His papers, containing 595,000 items, are archived at The Library of Congress.Sagan advocated scientific skeptical inquiry and the scientific method, pioneered exobiology and promoted the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence . He spent most of his career as a professor of astronomy at Cornell University, where he directed the Laboratory for Planetary Studies. Sagan and his works received numerous awards and honors, including the NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, the National Academy of Sciences Public Welfare Medal, the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction for his book The Dragons of Eden, and, regarding Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, two Emmy Awards, the Peabody Award, and the Hugo Award. He married three times and had five children. After suffering from myelodysplasia, Sagan died of pneumonia at the age of 62, on December 20, 1996. Wikipedia  

✵ 9. November 1934 – 20. December 1996   •   Other names Karl Seýgan
Carl Sagan photo
Carl Sagan: 365   quotes 50   likes

Carl Sagan Quotes

“It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo's work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

Source: Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1994), p. 43

Books , Soul , Reading

“Appeal to ignorance — the claim that whatever has not been proved false must be true, and vice versa (e. g. There is no compelling evidence that UFOs are not visiting the Earth; therefore UFOs exist — and there is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe. Or: There may be seventy kazillion other worlds, but not one is known to have the moral advancement of the Earth, so we're still central to the Universe.) This impatience with ambiguity can be criticized in the phrase: absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”

Carl Sagan

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

Life , World , Intelligence , Universe

“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?”

Carl Sagan book Pale Blue Dot

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

Life , God , Imagination , Intelligence

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

Carl Sagan book Contact

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

Powerful , Life

“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.”

Carl Sagan

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

History , Appearance

“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

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

People , Star , Time

“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.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 103

Life , Children , World , Family

“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 book Contact

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

Freedom

“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.”

Carl Sagan

Essay as "Mr. X" (1969)

Sex , Time , Parting

“Nobody listens to mathematicians.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 262

“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.”

Carl Sagan

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

Life , World , Home

“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.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

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;

Books , World

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

Carl Sagan book Contact

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

Understanding

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

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 196

“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.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 332

World , Courage , Knowledge , Universe

“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.”

Carl Sagan

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

Life , Law , Sense

“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.”

Carl Sagan

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

Star , Study

“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.”

Carl Sagan

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

People , World , Justice , Imagination

“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.”

Carl Sagan

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

World , Mathematics , Nature , Science

“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

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

World , Religion , Universe

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

Carl Sagan

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

“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.”

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 73

Time

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

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 94

“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.”

Carl Sagan

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

God , World , Religion , Understanding

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

Carl Sagan book Contact

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

“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.”

Carl Sagan

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

Religion , Knowledge , Science

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

Carl Sagan book Contact

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

Imagination

“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.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

Source: Contact (1985), Chapter 18 (p. 313)

“The chiliasts made an atheist out of me.”

Carl Sagan book Contact

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

Religion , Error

“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

Religion , Idea , Knowledge , Science

“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)

God

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

Carl Sagan book Cosmos

Source: Cosmos (1980), p. 173

Understanding , Time

“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

Imagination

“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)

Truth , Religion , Way , Idea

“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)

Love

“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]

Men , People , Peace , Bird

“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)

Love , Truth , Nature

“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/

Hostility , Understanding , Question , Nature

“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)

Love , Life , World , Beer

“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)

Lying , Time , Reading

“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)

Universe

“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)

God , Angels , Science , Time

“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

God , Religion , Dreams , Way

“If I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the laws of nature to be in some intermediate position, that would likely strike you as absurd, as contrary to experience. And yet on the subatomic level, there is a quantization of energy and position and momentum. The reason that it seems counterintuitive is that is that we are not ordinarily down at the level of the very small, where quantum effects dominate.”

Carl Sagan

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

Law , Nature