The fossil record implies trial and error, the inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with a Great Designer (though not a… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
The secrets of evolution are death and time-the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“Russell commented that the development of such gifted individuals (referring to polymaths) required a childhood period in which there was little or… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“Significant change might require those who are now high in the hierarchy to move downward many steps. This seems to them undesirable… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“Perhaps if one less dragonfly had drowned in the Carboniferous swamps, the intelligent organisms on our planet today would have feathers and… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“It may be that there are kernels of truth in a few of these doctrines, but their widespread acceptance betokens a lack… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“Natural selection has served as a kind of intellectual sieve, producing brains and intelligences increasingly competent to deal with the laws of… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“When all is said and done, the invention of writing must be reckoned not only as a brilliant innovation but as a… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“This sort of information gathering is precisely what we call play. And the important function of play is thus revealed: it permits… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
There are many other (besides testosterone) behaviour-eliciting hormones fundamental for humen well-being, including estrogen and progesterone in females. The fact that complex… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“the future belongs to those societies that treat new ideas as delicate, fragile and immensely valuable pathways to the future.” — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“The entire evolutionary record on our planet, particularly the record contained in fossil endocasts, illustrates a progressive tendency toward intelligence. There is… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
We are the first species to have taken our evolution into our own hands. — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions. — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
(When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
We are made of stellar ash. Our origin and evolution have been tied to distant cosmic events. The exploration of the cosmos… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“The secrets of evolution, are time and death. There's an unbroken thread that stretches from those first cells to us.” — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
The prediction of nuclear winter is drawn not, of course, from any direct experience with the consequences of global nuclear war, but rather from… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
The suppression of uncomfortable ideas may be common in religion or in politics, but it is not the path to knowledge; it has no… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“Telepathy’ literally means to feel at a distance, just as ‘telephone’ is to hear at a distance and ‘television’ is to see at a… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“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… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies,… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams! — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“[ When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996 :] If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion,… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
“Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
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… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
