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Carl Sagan Quotes - Page 6

All Quotes Acceptance Age Art Astronomy Atheism Atheist Authority Awareness Balance Belief Challenges Character Childhood Children Church Community Compassion Consciousness Creation Criticism Culture Curiosity Darkness Death Doubt Earth Education Enthusiasm Evidence Evolution Giving God Greek Heart History Home Humanity Humility Ignorance Imagination Injury Inspirational Judging Knowledge Learning Life Lifetime Love Loyalty Lying Magic Mathematics Memories Moon Morning Motivation Motivational Nature Observation Opportunity Pain Passion Past Perspective Philosophy Physics Prejudice Purpose Reading Reality Rejection Religion Responsibility Risk Romance Running Science Science And Technology Spirituality Spring Stupidity Survival Teaching Technology Time Today Truth Understanding Universe Vision Waiting War Water Weakness Winter Writing

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement - plants and animals each inhaling each other's exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.

Stars, Animal, Mouths

Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.54, Ballantine Books

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.

Matter, Sacred, Sensitive

Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.56, Ballantine Books

If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science.

Atheist, Children, Religion

But I could be wrong.

Recent research shows that many children without enough to eat wind up with diminished capacity to understand and learn (“cognitive impairment” ). Children don't have to be starving for this to happen. Even mild undernourishment — the kind most common among poor people in America — can do it.

Children, Wind, America

"The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark".

For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.

Stars, Humility, Political

It's hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.

Vastness, Consciousness, Creatures

Carl Sagan (1997). “Contact”, p.147, Simon and Schuster

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Love, Inspirational, Life

Carl Sagan (1997). “Contact”, p.430, Simon and Schuster

At the heart of science is an essential balance between two seemingly contradictory attitudes-an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new. This is how deep truths are winnowed from deep nonsense.

Attitude, Heart, Science

"The Demon-Haunted World : Science as a Candle in the Dark". Ch. 17 : The Marriage of Skepticism and Wonder. Book by Carl Sagan, 1995.

In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything?

Giving, Hearing, Willing

Carl Sagan (2006). “The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God”, p.195, Penguin

There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises

Light, Years, Forever

Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.50, Ballantine Books

Stars are phoenixes, rising from their own ashes.

Stars, Phoenix, Ashes

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. The amount of weapons that are available to the United States and the Soviet Union are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed to dissuade the other, that if it weren't so tragic, it would be laughable. What is necessary is to reduce the matches and to clean up the gasoline.

Science, Two, Enemy

During a panel discussion in ABC News Viewpoint following the TV movie "The Day After", November 20, 1983.

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify.

Teamwork, Mistake, Missing

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

Reading, Writing, Cosmos

Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.305, Ballantine Books

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. - Dr. Carl Sagan

Running, Humble, Long Ago

Carl Sagan (2011). “Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium”, p.104, Ballantine Books

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

Night, Doors, Sky

Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.32, Ballantine Books

The difference between physics and metaphysics is not that the practitioners of one are smarter than the practitioners of the other. The difference is that the metaphysicist has no laboratory.

Differences, Physics, Laboratory

Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.64, Ballantine Books

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.

Motivational, Learning, Humility

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time.

Lonely, War, Ocean

"Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". Documentary (1990 Update). Episode 13: "Who Speaks for Earth?", 1990.

It's a lazy Saturday afternoon, there's a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more 'numinous' than the Ressurection. Do they know how to have a good time, or don't they?

Couple, Lying, Reading

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

Cells, Hundred, Made

Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.51, Ballantine Books

If we ruin the earth, there is no place else to go

Earth, Ruins, Ifs

Preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Home, Blue, Cosmos

Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.29, Ballantine Books

In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

Kindness, Fear, Real

Carl Sagan (2011). “The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.298, Ballantine Books

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