Top 500 Carl Sagan Quotes (2026 Update)
Page 10 of 10

451. “The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of oppressed cultures. Shamans, magicians and theologians are highly skilled in their intricate and arcane arts. No, the impediment is political and hierarchical.”

— Carl Sagan

452. “The fifth regular solid must then, they thought, correspond to some fifth element that could only be the substance of the heavenly bodies.”

— Carl Sagan

453. “It is precisely our plasticity, our long childhood, that prevents a slavish adherence to genetically programmed behavior in human beings more than in any other species.”

— Carl Sagan

454. “Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom.”

— Carl Sagan

455. “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

456. “Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term.”

— Carl Sagan

457. “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

458. “The visions we offer our children shape the future. It matters what those visions are.”

— Carl Sagan

459. “Every generation worries that educational standards are decaying. One of the oldest short essays in human history, dating from Sumer some 4,000 years ago, laments that the young are disastrously more ignorant than the generation immediately preceding.”

— Carl Sagan

460. “En la ciencia no hay preguntas prohibidas, no hay temas demasiado sensibles o delicados para ser explorados, no hay verdades sagradas.”

— Carl Sagan

461. “Think of the power of repetitive imagery in advertising, especially to suggestible viewers and readers. It can make us believe almost anything – even that smoking cigarettes is cool.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

463. “It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.”

— Carl Sagan

464. “If God is omnipotent and omniscient, why didn’t he start the universe out in the first place so it would come out the way he wants? Why’s he constantly repairing and complaining? No, there’s one thing the Bible makes clear: The biblical God is a sloppy manufacturer.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

466. “Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs, who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”

— Carl Sagan

467. “I don’t think science is hard to teach because humans aren’t ready for it, or because it arose only through a fluke, or because, by and large, we don’t have the brainpower to grapple with it. Instead, the enormous zest for science that I see in first-graders and the lesson from the remnant hunter-gatherers both speak eloquently: a proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright.”

— Carl Sagan

468. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

470. “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

471. “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

472. “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

473. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

476. “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

477. “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

478. “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

479. “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

480. “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

481. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

484. “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

485. “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

486. “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

487. “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

488. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

490. “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

491. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

493. “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

494. “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

495. “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

496. “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

497. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

500. “God pity a one-dream man.”

— Carl Sagan