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Inspirational Quotes by Carl Sagan

49 Inspirational quotes by Carl Sagan

All Inspirational quotes Carl Sagan’s page

Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious, a tiny being among billions of galaxies. The quotes warn us not to judge others with our own limited view and to keep questioning authority, because without curiosity we become like putty in powerful hands. They also say that learning is our tool for survival and that only the curious survive as spacefaring societies.

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We were wanderers from the beginning.

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We are all made up of star stuff.

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To read is to voyage through time.

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What an astonishing thing a book is.

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We are made of starstuff.

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

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Atheism is very stupid.

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We are the universe experiencing itself.

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Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

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

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UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable.

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

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The universe forces those who live in it to understand it.

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The sacred truth of science is that there are no sacred truths.

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We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos.

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Our passion for learning ... is our tool for survival.

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The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.

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The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.

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The cosmos is full beyond measure of elegant truths / of exquisite interrelationships / of the awesome machinery of nature

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The words "question" and "quest" are cognates. Only through inquiry can we discover truth.

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

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An atheist has to know more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no God.

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

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If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in…

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Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to…

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“Our particular causality scheme has brought us to a modest and rudimentary, although in many respects heroic, series of explorations. But it…

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“It is conventional wisdom now that anything built by the government will be a disaster. But the two "Voyager" spacecraft were built…

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A book is made from a tree. It is an assemblage of flat, flexible parts (still called "leaves") imprinted with dark pigmented…

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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…

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“These days, there seems to be nowhere left to explore. Victims of their very success, the explorers now, pretty much, stay home.…

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Science is a way to not fool ourselves.

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Valid criticism does you a favor.

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Billions and billions.

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We are one species. We are starstuff.

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Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us

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We began as wanderers, and we are wanderers still.

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All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.

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

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It means nothing to be open to a proposition we don't understand.

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Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have.

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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.