Dr. Carl Sagan Quotes

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

It's better to light a candle then to curse the darkness.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think its forever.

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.

It is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

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

When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you never forget it.

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.

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

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?

The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.

I maintain there is much more wonder in science than in pseudoscience. And in addition, to whatever measure this term has any meaning, science has the additional virtue, and it is not an inconsiderable one, of being true.

The surface of the Earth is the shore of the cosmic ocean. From it we have learned most of what we know. Recently, we have waded a little out to sea, enough to dampen our toes or, at most, wet our ankles. The water seems inviting. The ocean calls. So.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

We are star-stuff.