Carl Sagan Quotes - Page 20

Quotes about:

• A stars rich in europium; of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.

  Carl Sagan

  Stars, Light, Technique

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.117, Ballantine Books

  8 Copy quote

• I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.

  Carl Sagan

  Atheist, Believe, Thinking

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Billions & Billions: Thoughts on Life and Death at the Brink of the Millennium”, p.245, Ballantine Books

  7 Copy quote

• We are an intelligent species and the use of our intelligence quite properly gives us pleasure. In this respect the brain is like a muscle. When we think well, we feel good. Understanding is a kind of ecstasy.

  Carl Sagan

  Respect, Science, Intelligent

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science”, p.17, Ballantine Books

  7 Copy quote

• I don't know the answer. Maybe no one knows. Maybe when you grow up, you'll be the first to find out.

  Carl Sagan

  Growing Up, Answers, Firsts

  4 Copy quote

• There is a lurking fear that some things are not “meant" to be known, that some inquiries are too dangerous for human beings to make.

  Carl Sagan

  Keeping Secrets, Some Things Are Meant To Be, Known

  "Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science".

  7 Copy quote

• Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.

  Carl Sagan

  Binary, Yes Or No, Crisps

  Carl Sagan (2012). “Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence”, p.23, Ballantine Books

  4 Copy quote

• Time spent with children is time well spent. Their little minds are not constrained by 'reality' or focused upon goals. Anything and everything is possible. Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

  Carl Sagan

  Children, Reality, Imagination

  7 Copy quote

• For myself, I like a universe that, includes much that is unknown and, at the same time, much that is knowable. A universe in which everything is known would be static and dull, as boring as the heaven of some weak-minded theologians. A universe that is unknowable is no fit place for a thinking being. The ideal universe for us is one very much like the universe we inhabit. And I would guess that this is not really much of a coincidence.

  Carl Sagan

  Knowledge, Science, Thinking

  Carl Sagan, Jerald F. TerHorst, Allan J. Mayer, Sharon S. McKern, Laurence J. Peter (1980). “Broca's brain: reflections on the romance of science”

  5 Copy quote

• This oak tree and me, we're made of the same stuff.

  Carl Sagan

  Tree, Stuff, Made

  7 Copy quote

• When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Survivor, Kicking

  11 Copy quote

• The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.

  Carl Sagan

  Years, Together, Atoms

  "Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". Documentary (1990 Update). Episode 5: "Blues For a Red Planet", 1990.

  4 Copy quote

• Books are key to understanding the world and participating in a democratic society.

  Carl Sagan

  Book, Keys, Understanding

  "The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark". Book by Carl Sagan, Ch. 21: The Path to Freedom, 1995.

  4 Copy quote

• Has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? . . . No other human institution comes close.

  Carl Sagan

  Life, Reliability, Institutions

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.55, Ballantine Books

  7 Copy quote

• Those with the courage to explore the weave and structure of the Cosmos, even where it differs profoundly from their wishes and prejudices, will penetrate its deepest mysteries.

  Carl Sagan

  Wish, Prejudice, Cosmos

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.362, Ballantine Books

  8 Copy quote

• My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, our curiosity and intelligence is provided by such a God. We would be unappreciative of that gift if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves.

  Carl Sagan

  God, Passion, Religion

  Carl Sagan (1979). “Broca's brain: reflections on the romance of science”, Random House Inc

  4 Copy quote

• The usual rejoinder to someone who says 'They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Galileo' is to say 'But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown'.

  Carl Sagan

  Science, Usual, Columbus

  4 Copy quote

• Many statements about God are confidently made by theologians on grounds that today at least sound specious. Thomas Aquinas claimed to prove that God cannot make another God, or commit suicide, or make a man without a soul, or even make a triangle whose interior angles do not equal 180 degrees. But Bolyai and Lobachevsky were able to accomplish this last feat (on a curved surface) in the nineteenth century, and they were not even approximately gods.

  Carl Sagan

  Suicide, Atheist, Men

  5 Copy quote

• Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species - back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire - has been ethically ambiguous.

  Carl Sagan

  Atheist, Fire, Religion

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.476, Ballantine Books

  4 Copy quote

• Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us

  Carl Sagan

  Running, Government

  Carl Sagan, Tom Head (2006). “Conversations with Carl Sagan”, p.143, Univ. Press of Mississippi

  4 Copy quote

• If there is life, then I believe we should do nothing to disturb that life.
  Mars then, belongs to the Martians, even if they are microbes.

  Carl Sagan

  Believe, Mars, Should

  4 Copy quote

• Which aspects of our nature will prevail is uncertain, particularly when our visions and prospects are bound to one small part of the small planet Earth. But up there in the Cosmos an inescapable perspective awaits.

  Carl Sagan

  Perspective, Vision, Cosmos

  "Cosmos". p. 318. Book by Carl Sagan, 1980.

  4 Copy quote

• Observation: I can't see a thing. Conclusion: Dinosaurs.

  Carl Sagan

  Dinosaurs, Sagan, Observation

  5 Copy quote

• The near side of a galaxy is tens of thousands of light-years closer to us than the far side; thus we see the front as it was tens of thousands of years before the back. But typical events in galactic dynamics occupy tens of millions of years, so the error in thinking of an image of a galaxy as frozen in one moment of time is small.

  Carl Sagan

  Thinking, Errors, Light

  Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.293, Ballantine Books

  4 Copy quote

• I believe that even a smattering of such findings in modern science and mathematics is far more compelling and exciting than most of the doctrines of pseudoscience, whose practitioners were condemned as early as the fifth century B.C. by the Ionian philosopher Heraclitus as “nigh -walkers, magicians, priests of Bacchus, priestesses of the wine-vat, mystery-mongers.” But science is more intricate and subtle, reveals a much richer imiverse, and powerfully evokes our sense of wonder.

  Carl Sagan

  Wine, Science, Night

  "Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science".

  21 Copy quote

• Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past.

  Carl Sagan

  Past, Men, Males

  4 Copy quote

Page 20 of 24

First

← Prev

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin