Carl Sagan Quotes - Page 20

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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".

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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

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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

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

Carl Sagan

Tree, Stuff, Made

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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

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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”

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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.

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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.

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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If we're capable of conjuring up terrifying monsters in childhood, why shouldn't some of us, at least on occasion, be able to fantasize something similar, something truly horrifying, a shared delusion, as adults?

Carl Sagan

Atheist, Childhood, Religion

Carl Sagan (2011). “Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark”, p.149, Ballantine Books

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Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself.

Carl Sagan

Men, Cosmos, Matter

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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

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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

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

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