Quotes by Carl Sagan

“They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”

“Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science?”

“We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.”

“Widespread intellectual and moral docility may be convenient for leaders in the short term, but it is suicidal for nations in the long term. One of the criteria for national leadership should therefore be a talent for understanding, encouraging, and making constructive use of vigorous criticism.”

“A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.”

“I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.”

“For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves, ... This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.”

“In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams!”

“The significance of a finding that there are other beings who share this universe with us would be absolutely phenomenal, it would be an epochal event in human history,”

“Whats the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses.”

“We live at a moment when our relationships to each other, and to all other beings with whom we share this planet, are up for grabs.”

“We have swept through all of the planets in the solar system, from Mercury to Neptune, in a historic 20 (to) 30 year age of spacecraft discovery,”

“Are we an exceptionally unlikely accident or is the universe brimming over with intelligence? (Its) a vital question for understanding ourselves and our history,”

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.

The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us -- there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

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

We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.

Look again at that dot. Thats here. Thats home. Thats us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.