A millennium before Europeans were willing to divest themselves of the Biblical idea that the world was a few thousand years old,… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Since World War II, Japan has spawned enormous numbers of new religions featuring the supernatural.... In Thailand, diseases are treated with pills… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War I. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
When you buy a used car, you kick the tires, you look at the odometer, you open up the hood. If you… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
The reappearance of the crescent moon after the new moon; the return of the Sun after a total eclipse, the rising of… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
Is mankind alone in the universe? Or are there somewhere other intelligent beings looking up into their night sky from very different… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
But I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain,… — Carl Sagan Copy Share Image
There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand 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
