Top 500 Carl Sagan Quotes (2025 Update)
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301. “The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

305. “Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. When we recognize our place in an immensity of light-years and in the passage of ages, when we grasp the intricacy, beauty, and subtlety of life, then that soaring feeling, that sense of elation and humility combined, is surely spiritual.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

307. “The lifetime of a human being is measured by decades, the lifetime of the Sun is a hundred million times longer. Compared to a star, we are like mayflies, fleeting ephemeral creatures who live out their lives in the course of a single day.”

— Carl Sagan

308. “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

309. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

311. “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

312. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

314. “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

315. “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

316. “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

317. “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

318. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

321. “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

322. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

325. “Who are we, if not measured by our impact on others?”

— Carl Sagan

326. “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

327. “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

328. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

330. “Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.”

— Carl Sagan

331. “There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and how we got here. It is an on-going search, often unconscious, for a cosmic perspective for humanity.”

— Carl Sagan

332. “Our ancestors lived out of doors. They were as familiar with the night sky as most of us are with our favorite television programs.”

— Carl Sagan

333. “I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.”

— Carl Sagan

334. “But I try not to think with my gut. If I’m serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble.”

— Carl Sagan

335. “We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.”

— Carl Sagan

336. “While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.”

— Carl Sagan

337. “The Earth is a place. It is by no means the only place. It is not even a typical place.”

— Carl Sagan

338. “Science is merely an extremely powerful method of winnowing what’s true from what feels good.”

— Carl Sagan

339. “A still more glorious dawn awaits.”

— Carl Sagan

340. “Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.”

— Carl Sagan

341. “Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time.”

— Carl Sagan

342. “UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable.”

— Carl Sagan

343. “The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed.”

— Carl Sagan

344. “There is never only ONE of anything in nature.”

— Carl Sagan

345. “Finding the occasional straw of truth awash in a great ocean of confusion and bamboozle requires intelligence, vigilance, dedication, and courage. But if we don’t practice these tough habits of thought, we cannot hope to solve the truly serious problems that face us – and we risk becoming a nation of suckers, up for grabs by the next charlatan who comes along.”

— Carl Sagan

346. “On the other hand, mere critical thinking, without creative and intuitive insights, without the search for new patterns, is sterile and doomed. To solve complex problems in changing circumstances requires the activity of both cerebral hemispheres: the path to the future lies through the corpus callosum.”

— Carl Sagan

347. “Humans – who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals – have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.”

— Carl Sagan

348. “At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.”

— Carl Sagan

349. “The illegality of cannabis is outrageous...”

— Carl Sagan

350. “Nobody listens to mathematicians.”

— Carl Sagan