Top 500 Carl Sagan Quotes (2024 Update)
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351. “It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don’t understand.”

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

353. “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

354. “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

355. “Every cell is a triumph of natural selection, and we’re made of trillions of cells. Within us, is a little universe.”

— Carl Sagan

356. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

359. “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

360. “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

361. “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

362. “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

363. “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

364. “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

365. “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

366. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

368. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

371. “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

372. “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

373. “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

374. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

376. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

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

— Carl Sagan

380. “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

381. “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

382. “A still more glorious dawn awaits.”

— Carl Sagan

383. “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

384. “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

385. “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

386. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

388. “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

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

— Carl Sagan

390. “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

391. “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

392. “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

393. “Ours is the first generation that has grown up with science-fiction ideas.”

— Carl Sagan

394. “All inquires carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions.”

— Carl Sagan

395. “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

396. “We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.”

— Carl Sagan

397. “If we do not speak for Earth, who will? If we are not committed to our own survival, who will be?”

— Carl Sagan

398. “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

399. “Few scientists now dispute that today’s soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000.”

— Carl Sagan

400. “Nature does not always conform to our predispositions and preferences, to what we deem comfortable and easy to understand.”

— Carl Sagan