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| Carl Sagan Quotes |
Carl Sagan Biography
- Full Name : Carl Edward Sagan
- Born : November 9, 1934 (Brooklyn, New York, U.S)
- Dead : December 20, 1996 (Seattle, Washington, U.S)
- Nationality : American
- Profession : Science Writer, Astronomer
- University : University of Chicago
- Awards : Pulitzer Prize, NASA Distinguished Public Service Medal, and Klumpke-Roberts Award
- Spouse : Lynn Margulis
Facts About Carl Sagan
- Carl Sagan supported the legalization of marijuana.
- Carl Sagan wrote 20 drafts of his book, Pale Blue Dot.
- Carl Sagan was an early defender of climate science.
- Harvard denied Sagan tenure in 1967.
- Carl Sagan considered writing a children’s book called How Do Birds Fly?
- Carl Sagan has an archive in the Library of Congress endowed by the creator of Family Guy.
- Carl Sagan thought Star Trek was too white.
- Carl Sagan dictated all of his writing to an audio recorder.
- Carl Sagan came up with the universal message sent out on the Voyager satellites.
Carl Sagan Quotes
1. “ It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. ”
— Carl Sagan
2. “ We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever. ”
— Carl Sagan
3. “ We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers. ”
— Carl Sagan
4. “ I don’t want to believe. I want to know. ”
— Carl Sagan
5. “ 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
6. “ Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. ”
— Carl Sagan
7. “ For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring. ”
— Carl Sagan
8. “ If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth. ”
— Carl Sagan
9. “ Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. ”
— Carl Sagan
10. “ The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. ”
— Carl Sagan
11. “ Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, but without it we go nowhere. ”
— Carl Sagan
12. “ We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. ”
— Carl Sagan
13. “ You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other. ”
— Carl Sagan
14. “ If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe. ”
— Carl Sagan
15. “ I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But as much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking. ”
— Carl Sagan
16. “ Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works. ”
— Carl Sagan
17. “ We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces. ”
— Carl Sagan
18. “ The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what’s true. ”
— Carl Sagan
19. “ It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out. ”
— Carl Sagan
20. “ 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
21. “ Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality. ”
— Carl Sagan
22. “ I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students. ”
— Carl Sagan
23. “ Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved? ”
— Carl Sagan
24. “ Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history. ”
— Carl Sagan
25. “ Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact. ”
— Carl Sagan
26. “ But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. ”
— Carl Sagan
27. “ It is the tension between creativity and skepticism that has produced the stunning and unexpected findings of science. ”
— Carl Sagan
28. “ Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge. ”
— Carl Sagan
29. “ Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. ”
— Carl Sagan
30. “ If the greenhouse effect is a blanket in which we wrap ourselves to keep warm, nuclear winter kicks the blanket off. ”
— Carl Sagan
31. “ We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good. ”
— Carl Sagan
32. “ Science is a way to not fool ourselves. ”
— Carl Sagan
33. “ The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas. ”
— Carl Sagan
34. “ 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
35. “ There is much about which even experts are ignorant; this will probably always be the case. ”
— Carl Sagan
36. “ One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time. ”
— Carl Sagan
37. “ In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn’t happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.”
— Carl Sagan
38. “ There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong. That’s perfectly all right; they’re the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny. ”
— Carl Sagan
39. “ It is of interest to note that while some dolphins are reported to have learned English—up to fifty words used in correct context—no human being has been reported to have learned dolphinese. ”
— Carl Sagan
40. “ The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition. ”
— Carl Sagan
41. “ The cosmos is all that is, or ever was, or ever will be. ”
— Carl Sagan
42. “ We live in a society absolutely dependent on science and technology and yet have cleverly arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. That’s a clear prescription for disaster. ”
— Carl Sagan
43. “ Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense. ”
— Carl Sagan
44. “ For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love. ”
— Carl Sagan
45. “ The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. ”
— Carl Sagan
46. “ All of the books in the world contain no more information than is broadcast as video in a single large American city in a single year. Not all bits have equal value. ”
— Carl Sagan
47. “ We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. ”
— Carl Sagan
48. “ The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it’s just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age. ”
— Carl Sagan
49. “ 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
50. “ Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. ”
— Carl Sagan
51. “ Children [are] born with a zest for knowledge, aware that they must live in a future molded by science, but so often convinced by their culture that science is not for them. ”
— Carl Sagan
52. “ When you make the finding yourself – even if you’re the last person on Earth to see the light – you’ll never forget it. ”
— Carl Sagan
53. “ There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question. ”
— Carl Sagan
54. “ Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world. ”
— Carl Sagan
55. “ The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. ”
— Carl Sagan
56. “ Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves, but also to the cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring. ”
— Carl Sagan
57. “ 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
58. “ The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous. ”
— Carl Sagan
59. “ The testimony of our common sense is suspect at high velocities. ”
— Carl Sagan
60. “ A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable. ”
— Carl Sagan
61. “ 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
62. “ Humans everywhere share the same goals when the context is large enough. And the study of the Cosmos provides the largest possible context. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth. ”
— Carl Sagan
63. “ Skepticism enables us to distinguish fancy from fact, to test our speculations. ”
— Carl Sagan
64. “ The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent. ”
— Carl Sagan
65. “ The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home. ”
— Carl Sagan
66. “ Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost between two spiral arms in the outskirts of a galaxy, tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people. ”
— Carl Sagan
67. “ Imagine a room awash in gasoline, and there are two implacable enemies in that room. One of them has nine thousand matches. The other has seven thousand matches. Each of them is concerned about who’s ahead, who’s stronger. Well that’s the kind of situation we are actually in. ”
— Carl Sagan
68. “ Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best one we have. In this respect, as in many others, it’s like democracy. ”
— Carl Sagan
69. “ I know of no area of human endeavor in which science has not had at least one important thing to say. ”
— Carl Sagan
70. “ Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It’s just the best one we have. In this respect, as in many others, it’s like democracy. ”
— Carl Sagan