Top 500 Carl Sagan Quotes (2026 Update)
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351. “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

352. “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

353. “We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster.”

— Carl Sagan

354. “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

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355. “There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

358. “It took the Church until 1832 to remove Galileo ’s work from its list of books which Catholics were forbidden to read at the risk of dire punishment of their immortal souls.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

360. “Nobody listens to mathematicians.”

— Carl Sagan

361. “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

362. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

368. “Skepticism does not sell well.”

— Carl Sagan

369. “In a world in transition, students and teachers both need to teach themselves one essential skill – learning how to learn.”

— Carl Sagan

370. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

372. “Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.”

— Carl Sagan

373. “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

374. “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

375. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Stories

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

— Carl Sagan

377. “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

378. “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

379. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

381. “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

382. “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

383. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

388. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

390. “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

391. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

393. “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

394. “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

395. “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

396. “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

397. “We will die and we fear death. This fear is worldwide and transcultural. It probably has significant survival value. Those who wish to postpone or avoid death can improve the world, reduce its perils, make children who will live after us, and create great works by which they will be remembered.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

399. “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

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

— Carl Sagan