Top 500 Carl Sagan Quotes (2024 Update)
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451. “Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it’s accompanied by an error bar – a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It’s a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge.”

— Carl Sagan

452. “Mare, despite its Latin meaning, is the Old English word for incubus, and nightmare meant originally the demon that sits on the chests of sleepers, tormenting them with dreams.”

— Carl Sagan

453. “La pseudociencia colma necesidades emocionales poderosas que la ciencia suele dejar insatisfechas.”

— Carl Sagan

454. “This is one of the fallacies in the baloney detection kit, the enumeration of favorable circumstances. We.”

— Carl Sagan

455. “Think of the rivers of blood, spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters, of a fraction of a dot... our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe – are challenged by that point of pale light.”

— Carl Sagan

456. “To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.”

— Carl Sagan

457. “The Man in the Moon is in fact a record of ancient catastrophes – most of which took place before humans, before mammals, and probably even before life arose on Earth. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put a human face on random cosmic violence.”

— Carl Sagan

458. “A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit.”

— Carl Sagan

459. “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who revealed himself in the harmony of all being, not in the God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men” – a more subtle religious view embraced by.”

— Carl Sagan

460. “On the scale of worlds – to say nothing of stars or galaxies – humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump of rock and metal.”

— Carl Sagan

461. “A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay.”

— Carl Sagan

462. “But deep down, the the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.”

— Carl Sagan

463. “If it takes a little myth and ritual to get us through a night that seems endless, who among us cannot sympathize and understand?”

— Carl Sagan

464. “It is on this world that we developed our passion for exploring the Cosmos, and it is here that we are, in some pain and with no guarantees, working out our destiny.”

— Carl Sagan

465. “Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our earthly hopes and fears. But our psychological predispositions pro or con must not mislead us. All that matters is the evidence, and the evidence is not yet in.”

— Carl Sagan

466. “Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up – the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains – were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.”

— Carl Sagan

467. “Science is an ongoing process. It never ends. There is no single ultimate truth to be achieved, after which all the scientists can retire. And because this is so, the world is far more interesting, both for the scientists and for the millions of people in every nation who, while not professional scientists, are deeply interested in the methods and findings of science.”

— Carl Sagan

468. “We have examined the universe in space and seen that we live on a mote of dust circling a humdrum star in the remotest corner of an obscure galaxy.”

— Carl Sagan

469. “When asked how he accomplished his astonishing discoveries, Newton replied unhelpfully, “By thinking upon them.”

— Carl Sagan

470. “For all its material advantages, the sedentary life has left us edgy, unfulfilled. Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood. We invest far-off places with a certain romance. This appeal, I suspect, has been meticulously crafted by natural selection as an essential element in our survival.”

— Carl Sagan

471. “Our species has discovered a way to communicate through the dark, to transcend immense distances. No means of communication is faster or cheaper or reaches out farther. It’s called radio.”

— Carl Sagan

472. “Even after 400 generations in villages and cities, we haven’t forgotten. The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood.”

— Carl Sagan

473. “The wolf stands on its hind legs, places its forelegs on the scientist’s shoulders, and places its jaws around the scientist’s head. This is just the wolf’s way of being friendly. If you’re an animal who doesn’t know how to talk, a very clear signal is communicated: “See my teeth? Feel them? I could hurt you, I really could. But I won’t. I like you.”

— Carl Sagan

474. “Nearly everyone in ancient Egypt exhorted the gods to let the Pharaoh live ’forever. These collective prayers failed. Their failure constitutes data.”

— Carl Sagan

475. “We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.”

— Carl Sagan

476. “Hallucinations may be a neglected low door in the wall to a scientific understanding of the sacred.”

— Carl Sagan

477. “Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished – perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds – on the distant planet Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

478. “The level of public education in science and technology is an important sign of the national scientific accomplishment. It is a matter of overall importance in economic development, scientific advance, and the progress of society.”

— Carl Sagan

479. “Adolf Hitler! Ken, it makes me furious. Forty million people die to defeat that megalomaniac, and he’s the star of the first broadcast to another civilization? He’s representing us. And them. It’s that madman’s dream come true.”

— Carl Sagan

480. “600 million years ago, the monopolizing grip of the algae was broken and an enormous proliferation of new lifeforms emerged, an event called the Cambrian explosion. Life had arisen almost immediately after the origin of the Earth, which suggests that life may be an inevitable chemical process on an Earth-like planet.”

— Carl Sagan

481. “Lashley also reported no apparent change in the general behavior of a rat when significant fractions – say 10 percent – of its brain were removed. But no one asked the rat of its opinion.”

— Carl Sagan

482. “The Sphinx is missing a nose. Someone shot it off in a moment of idle desecration – some say it was Mameluke Turks, others, Napoleonic soldiers.”

— Carl Sagan

483. “The scientific way of thinking is at once imaginative and disciplined. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions. It counsels us to carry alternative hypotheses in our heads and see which best fit the facts. It urges on us a delicate balance between no-holds-barred openness to new ideas, however heretical, and the most rigorous skeptical scrutiny of everything – new ideas and established wisdom.”

— Carl Sagan

484. “Society corrupts the best of us. It is a little unfair, I think, to criticize a person for not sharing the enlightenment of a later epoch, but it is also profoundly saddening that such prejudices were so extremely pervasive. The question raises nagging uncertainties about which of the conventional truths of our own age will be considered unforgivable bigotry by the next.”

— Carl Sagan

485. “The universe belongs to those who, at least to some degree, have figured it out.”

— Carl Sagan

486. “This process is called artificial selection. In the case of the Heike crab it was effected more or less unconsciously by the fishermen, and certainly without any serious contemplation by the crabs. But humans have deliberately selected which plants and animals shall live and which shall die for thousands of years.”

— Carl Sagan

487. “I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.”

— Carl Sagan

488. “The only planet we are sure is inhabited is a tiny speck of rock and metal, shining feebly by reflected sunlight, and at this distance utterly lost.”

— Carl Sagan

489. “The whole idea of a democratic application of skepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge.”

— Carl Sagan

490. “Then, if we really want our celestial neighbors to know how far we have progressed intelectually, we should have included pictures of Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairy.”

— Carl Sagan

491. “Placebos can be astonishingly effective, especially for colds, anxiety, depression, pain, and symptoms that are plausibly generated by the mind. Conceivably, endorphins – the small brain proteins with morphinelike effects – can be elicited by belief. A placebo works only if the patient believes it’s an effective medicine. Within strict limits, hope, it seems, can be transformed into biochemistry. As.”

— Carl Sagan

492. “The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have to be. No witness’s say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they’re seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren’t there.”

— Carl Sagan

493. “The Cosmos is rich beyond measure – in elegant facts, in exquisite interrelationships, in the subtle machinery of awe.”

— Carl Sagan

494. “Many of the problems facing us may be soluble, but only if we are willing to embrace brilliant, daring and complex solutions. Such solutions require brilliant, daring and complex people. I believe that there are many more of them around – in every nation, ethnic group and degree of affluence – than we realize.”

— Carl Sagan

495. “By far the most exciting, satisfying and exhilarating time to be alive is the time in which we pass from ignorance to knowledge on these fundamental issues; the age where we begin in wonder and end in understanding. In all of the four-billion-year history of life on our planet, in all of the four-million-year history of the human family, there is only one generation privileged to live through that unique transitional moment: that generation is ours.”

— Carl Sagan

496. “God pity a one-dream man.”

— Carl Sagan

497. “The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. Some part of our being knows this is from where we came. We long to return. These aspirations are not, I think, irreverent, although they may trouble whatever gods may be.”

— Carl Sagan

498. “The cerebral cortex is a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons. We are, each of us, largely responsible for what gets put into our brains, for what, as adults, we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain, we can change ourselves.”

— Carl Sagan

499. “One of the reasons for its success is that science has built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition. Every.”

— Carl Sagan

500. “The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us – there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.”

— Carl Sagan