Carl Sagan Quotes

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Acceptance Age Agnosticism Aliens Animals Arguing Art

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

Carl Sagan

Taken, Science, Long

Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.314, Ballantine Books

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

Carl Sagan

Wisdom, Understanding, Brain

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I don't want to believe. I want to know.

Carl Sagan

Inspirational, Life, Religious

"Biography/ Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

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Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

Carl Sagan

Positive, Hope, Educational

Nobel Award Ceremony Speech by Professor Olga Botner, Member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, www.nobelprize.org. December 10, 2017.

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

Carl Sagan

Motivational, Education, Knowledge

"Why We Need To Understand Science". The Skeptical Inquirer Vol. 14, Issue 3, www.csicop.org. Spring 1990.

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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

Science, Prejudice, Vastness

"Wonder and Skepticism". The Skeptical Inquirer 19 (1), www.csicop.org. January/February 1995.

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If we continue to accumulate only power and not wisdom, we will surely destroy ourselves.

Carl Sagan

Ifs

Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan (2011). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, p.354, Ballantine Books

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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

Stars, Iron, Apples

Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.255, Ballantine Books

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We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock.

Carl Sagan

Rocks, Humanity, World

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You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe

Carl Sagan

Death, Faith, Atheist

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

Carl Sagan

Life, Art, Motivation

Carl Sagan (2011). “Cosmos”, p.26, Ballantine Books

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What distinguishes our species is thought. The cerebral cortex is in a way a liberation. We need no longer be trapped in the genetically inherited behavior patterns of lizards and baboons: territoriality and aggression and dominance hierarchies. We are each of us largely responsible for what gets put in to our brains. For what as adults we wind up caring for and knowing about. No longer at the mercy of the reptile brain we can change ourselves. Think of the possibilities.

Carl Sagan

Caring, Thinking, Wind

"Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". TV Series (Episode 11: The Persistence of Memory), 1990.

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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.

Carl Sagan

Animal, Men, Thinking

Carl Sagan (1973). “Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective”, p.5, Cambridge University Press

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

Carl Sagan

Death, Witty, Atheist

Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.32, Ballantine Books

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The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Carl Sagan

Absence, Evidence

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In many cultures it is customary to answer that God created the universe out of nothing. But this is mere temporizing. If we wish courageously to pursue the question, we must, of course ask next where God comes from? And if we decide this to be unanswerable, why not save a step and conclude that the universe has always existed?

Carl Sagan

Atheist, Religion, Wish

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If you look at Earth from space you see a dot, that's here. That's home. That's us. It underscores the responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Carl Sagan

Responsibility, Home, Blue

Source: www.cbsnews.com

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An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence. Because God can be relegated to remote times and places and to ultimate causes, we would have to know a great deal more about the universe than we do now to be sure that no such God exists. To be certain of the existence of God and to be certain of the nonexistence of God seem to me to be the confident extremes in a subject so riddled with doubt and uncertainty as to inspire very little confidence indeed.

Carl Sagan

Atheist, Inspire, Doubt

"Conversations with Carl Sagan". Book edited by Tom Head, p. 70, 2006.

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The cosmic calendar compresses the local history of the universe into a single year. If the universe began on January 1st it was not until May that the Milky Way formed. Other planetary systems may have appeared in June, July and August, but our Sun and Earth not until mid-September. Life arose soon after. We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

Carl Sagan

June, July, August

"Cosmos: A Personal Voyage". Documentary (1990 Update). Episode 1: "The Shores of the Cosmic Ocean", 1990.

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For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.

Carl Sagan

Moon, Rocks, Humanity

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The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.

Carl Sagan

Weed, Marijuana, Dangerous World

"Mr. X". Essay by Carl Sagan, hermiene.net. 1969.

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I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time - [...] when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

Carl Sagan

Children, Hands, America

"A Disturbing 1995 Prediction by Carl Sagan Accurately Describes America of Today" by PAUL RATNER, bigthink.com.

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

Carl Sagan

Night, Doors, Sky

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

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Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

Carl Sagan

Comforting, Fantasy, Hard

Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.263, Ballantine Books

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After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being - and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.

Carl Sagan

Stars, Years, Other Worlds

Carl Sagan (1994). “Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space”, Random House Incorporated

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Born: November 9, 1934
Died: December 20, 1996
Occupation: Astronomer
Cite this Page: Citation

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