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Time Quotes by Carl Sagan

86 Time quotes by Carl Sagan

All Time quotes Carl Sagan’s page

Sagan’s awe of Mars, where we sifted the sands, shows humanity’s drive to explore. He points out that books let us travel through time and learn from ancestors, and he warns that easy religious stories can block our natural curiosity. He also calls for realistic maps of the future that our children can trust.

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The visions we offer our children shape the future.

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To read is to voyage through time.

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My wonder button is being pushed all the time.

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Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.

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The price we pay for anticipation of the future is anxiety about it

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“Some thrive for time, while most quickly vanish.”

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You have to know the past to understand the present.

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How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact…

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We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged.

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“The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.”

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“Leave nothing to chance. Overlook nothing. Combine contradictory observations. Allow yourself enough time.”

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We live at a moment when our relationships to each other, and to all other beings with whom we share this planet,…

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For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

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“We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future?”

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Our children long for realistic maps of the future that they can be proud of. Where are the cartographers of human purpose?

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The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not…

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“The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer.”

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There is today-in a time when old beliefs are withering-a kind of philosophical hunger, a need to know who we are and…

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“In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with…

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Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future.…

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The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a…

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Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly…

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Probably a dozen times since their death I've heard my mother or father, in an ordinary conversational tone of voice, call my…

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We are rare and precious because we are alive, because we can think as well as we can. We are privileged to…

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“For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations, as in ancient Greece in the time…

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“In general, human societies are not innovative. They are hierarchical and ritualistic. Suggestions for change are greeted with suspicion: they imply an…

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“Black holes may be apertures to elsewhen. Were we to plunge down a black hole, we would re-emerge, it is conjectured, in…

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“I do not think it irresponsible to portray even the direst futures if we are to avoid them we must understand that…

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“In exact parallel to regressing people so they supposedly retrieve forgotten memories of ‘past lives’, Frankel notes that therapists can as readily…

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The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an…

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Today, we're still loaded down - and, to some extent, embarrassed - by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of…

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“We inhabit a universe where atoms are made in the centers of stars; where each second a thousand suns are born; where…

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“Consider again that pale blue dot...imagine that you take a good long look at it, imagine that you are starring at it…

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“Some women, it seemed, were entirely without guile and bestowed their affections with hardly a moment's conscious thought. Others set out to…

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“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and…

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“Books, purchasable at low cost, permit us to interrogate the past with high accuracy; to tap the wisdom of our species; to…

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“The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future,…

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“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and…

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“the consequences of scientific illiteracy are far more dangerous in our time than in any that has come before. It’s perilous and…

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“the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.”

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Other authors on Time

More by Carl Sagan

It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it…

The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from…

The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no…

“Telepathy’ literally means to feel at a distance, just as ‘telephone’ is to hear at a distance and ‘television’ is to see at a…

“On the scale of worlds—to say nothing of stars or galaxies—humans are inconsequential, a thin film of life on an obscure and solitary lump…

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies,…

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

“[ When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996 :] If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion,…

Don't judge everyone else by your own limited experience.

“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully…

We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make…

A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this…

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

Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain.…

Every star may be a sun to someone.