Top 500 Carl Sagan Quotes (2026 Update) [Page 7]

301. “Every aspect of Nature reveals a deep mystery and touches our sense of wonder and awe. 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

302. “In exchange for freedom of inquiry, scientists are obliged to explain their work.”

— Carl Sagan

303. “The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on it divine inspiration.”

— Carl Sagan

304. “Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.”

— Carl Sagan

305. “One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.”

— Carl Sagan

306. “If you are only skeptical, then no new ideas make it through to you.”

— Carl Sagan

307. “Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.”

— Carl Sagan

308. “The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.”

— Carl Sagan

309. “In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.”

— Carl Sagan

310. “Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human.”

— Carl Sagan

311. “Otherwise we don’t run the government the government runs us.”

— Carl Sagan

312. “Except for fools and madmen, everyone knows that nuclear war would he an unprecedented human catastrophe.”

— Carl Sagan

313. “A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old, the Mayans were thinking of millions and the Hindus billions.”

— Carl Sagan

314. “Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.”

— Carl Sagan

315. “Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.”

— Carl Sagan

316. “We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands.”

— Carl Sagan

Featured in: Firsts Quotes

317. “The fact that someone says something doesn’t mean it’s true. Doesn’t mean they’re lying, but it doesn’t mean it’s true.”

— Carl Sagan

318. “Every time you look up at the sky, every one of those points of light is a reminder that fusion power is extractable from hydrogen and other light elements, and it is an everyday reality throughout the Milky Way Galaxy.”

— Carl Sagan

319. “As the ancient myth makers knew, we are children equally of the earth and the sky.”

— Carl Sagan

320. “Discussing the possibilities of extraterrestrial life: I would love it even if they were short, sullen, grumpy and sexually obsessed. But there just isn’t any good evidence.”

— Carl Sagan

321. “The Milky Way Galaxy is one of billions, perhaps hundreds of billions of galaxies notable neither in mass nor in brightness nor in how its stars are configured and arrayed. Some modern deep sky photographs show more galaxies beyond the Milky Way than stars within the Milky Way. Every one of them is an island universe containing perhaps a hundred billion suns. Such an image is a profound sermon on humility.”

— Carl Sagan

322. “I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture, and our concern for the future, can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.”

— Carl Sagan

323. “The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.”

— Carl Sagan

324. “We are the children equally of the Sky and the Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

325. “Tsiolkovsky wrote: “The Earth is the cradle of mankind. But one does not live in the cradle forever.”

— Carl Sagan

$Carl Sagan Quote: “A handful of sand contains about 10,000 grains, more than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can see is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that are. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.”$

326. “A handful of sand contains about 10,000 grains, more than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can see is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that are. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

327. “The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos.”

— Carl Sagan

328. “Our children long for realistic maps of the future that they can be proud of. Where are the cartographers of human purpose?”

— Carl Sagan

329. “Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking.”

— Carl Sagan

330. “If intelligence is our only edge, we must learn to use it better, to shape it, to understand its limitations and deficiencies – to use it as cats use stealth, as katydids use camouflage – to make it the tool of our survival.”

— Carl Sagan

331. “We can always take but never give.”

— Carl Sagan

332. “We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.”

— Carl Sagan

333. “My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.”

— Carl Sagan

334. “I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation.”

— Carl Sagan

$Carl Sagan Quote: “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.”$

335. “The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 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.”

— Carl Sagan