History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
But, Jefferson worried that the people - and the argument goes back to Thucydides and Aristotle - are easily misled. He also… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
There are many hypotheses in physics of almost comparable brillance and elegance that have been rejected because they did not survive such… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
The impediment to scientific thinking is not, I think, the difficulty of the subject. Complex intellectual feats have been mainstays even of… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to interrogate those who tell us that something is true, to be skeptical… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West,… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success,… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Scientists constantly get clobbered with the idea that we spent 27 billion dollars on the Apollo programs, and are asked "What more… — 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 not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so… — Carl Sagan Copy Share
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 distance. The word suggests the communication not of thoughts but of feelings, emotions. Around a quarter of all Americans believe they’ve experienced something like telepathy. People who know each other very well, who live together, who… — Carl Sagan Copy Share
“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 extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our… — Carl Sagan Copy Share
We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400 billion other stars that make up the Milky Way Galaxy which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe which may be one of a very large number, perhaps an infinite number, of other universes. That is… — Carl Sagan Copy Share
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
![“[ When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996 :] If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses.” quote by Carl Sagan](https://sms4smile.com/quotes/img-quotes/875/carl-sagan-160_belief_when-a-religious-couple-wrote-to-sagan-a_25095.jpg)
