Top 500 Carl Sagan Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down – toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

352. “I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.”

— Carl Sagan

353. “We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars.”

— Carl Sagan

354. “The universe forces those who live in it to understand it.”

— Carl Sagan

355. “The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee.”

— Carl Sagan

356. “Skepticism does not sell well.”

— Carl Sagan

357. “In a lot of scientists, the ratio of wonder to skepticism declines in time. That may be connected with the fact that in some fields-mathematics, physics, some others-the great discoveries are almost entirely made by youngsters.”

— Carl Sagan

358. “It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don’t understand.”

— Carl Sagan

359. “These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.”

— Carl Sagan

360. “Liberation from superstition is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for science.”

— Carl Sagan

361. “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

362. “Many of the dangers we face indeed arise from science and technology – but, more fundamentally, because we have become powerful without becoming commensurately wise. The world-altering powers that technology has delivered into our hands now require a degree of consideration and foresight that has never before been asked of us.”

— Carl Sagan

363. “The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.”

— Carl Sagan

364. “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

365. “La ciencia no es solamente compatible con la espiritualidad, sino que es una profunda fuente de espiritualidad.”

— Carl Sagan

366. “We can’t help it. Life looks for life.”

— Carl Sagan

367. “We knew the Moon from our earliest days. It was there when our ancestors descended from the trees into the savannahs, when we learned to walk upright, when we first devised stone tools, when we domesticated fire, when we invented agriculture and built cities and set out to subdue the Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

368. “Of all the planets, moons, asteroids, and comets in our Solar System, there is fire only on Earth – because there are large amounts of oxygen gas, O2, only on Earth. Fire was, much later, to have profound consequences for life and intelligence. One thing leads to another.”

— Carl Sagan

369. “If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?”

— Carl Sagan

370. “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

371. “Once intelligent beings achieve technology and the capacity for self-destruction of their species, the selective advantage of intelligence becomes more uncertain.”

— Carl Sagan

372. “If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there’s nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?”

— Carl Sagan

373. “If constellations had been named in the 20th century, I suppose we would see bicycles.”

— Carl Sagan

374. “Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition.”

— Carl Sagan

375. “Pseudoscience speaks to powerful emotional needs that science often leaves unfulfilled. It caters to fantasies about personal powers we lack and long for.”

— Carl Sagan

376. “In our time we have less severe standards. We tell children about Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy for reasons we think emotionally sound, but then disabuse them of these myths before they’re grown. Why retract? Because their well-being as adults depends on them knowing the world as it really is. We worry, and for good reason, about adults who still believe in Santa Claus.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

378. “The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves – without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.”

— Carl Sagan

379. “Looking at fires when high, by the way, especially through one of those prism kaleidoscopes which image their surroundings, is an extraordinarily moving and beautiful experience.”

— Carl Sagan

380. “Are we willing to tolerate ignorance and complacency in matters that affect the entire human family?”

— Carl Sagan

381. “A radio telescope works more like a light meter than a camera. You point it toward some fairly broad region of the sky, and it records how much energy, in a particular radio frequency, is coming down to Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

382. “It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.”

— Carl Sagan

383. “There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.”

— Carl Sagan

384. “Thus, 99 percent of the Earth’s atmosphere is of biological origin. The sky is made by life.”

— Carl Sagan

385. “The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they’ve made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we’re in deep trouble.”

— Carl Sagan

386. “I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work.”

— Carl Sagan

387. “The ancient Ionians were the first we know of to argue systematically that laws and forces of Nature, rather than gods, are responsible for the order and even the existence of the world. As Lucretius summarized their views, “Nature free at once and rid of her haughty lords is seen to do all things spontaneously of herself without the meddling of the gods.”

— Carl Sagan

388. “If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone?”

— Carl Sagan

389. “If we’re capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn’t some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults?”

— Carl Sagan

390. “But humans have deliberately selected which plants and animals shall live and which shall die for thousands of years. We are surrounded from babyhood by familiar farm and domestic animals, fruits and trees and vegetables. Where do they come from? Were they once free-living in the wild and then induced to adopt a less strenuous life on the farm? No, the truth is quite different. They are, most of them, made by us.”

— Carl Sagan

391. “The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there’s little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.”

— Carl Sagan

392. “In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty.”

— Carl Sagan

393. “Civilization is a product of the cerebral cortex.”

— Carl Sagan

394. “Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there’s no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.”

— Carl Sagan

395. “We live at a moment when our relationships to each other, and to all other beings with whom we share this planet, are up for grabs.”

— Carl Sagan

396. “There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond... The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.”

— Carl Sagan

397. “Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there’s no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it’s an artefact from times long gone.”

— Carl Sagan

398. “I set before you two ways: You can use your technology to destroy yourselves or to carry you to the planets and the stars. It’s up to you.”

— Carl Sagan

399. “You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don’t see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.”

— Carl Sagan

400. “One of the central issues in the world population crisis is poverty.”

— Carl Sagan