Quotes from Carl Sagan

Man is the matter of the cosmos, contemplating itself.

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.

There is never only ONE of anything in nature.

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

we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers

Could we possible manage the next phase of human history without first dealing with this penchant for dehumanizing the adversary?

An atheist is someone who is certain that God does not exist, someone who has compelling evidence against the existence of God. I know of no such compelling evidence.

A general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the god portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy much less of a universe.

Your god is too small for my universe.

An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.

Humans are very good at dreaming, although you'd never know it from your television.

Where we have strong emotions, we're liable to fool ourselves.

I think the health of our civilization, the depth of our awareness about the underpinnings of our culture, and our concern for the future, can all be tested by how well we support our libraries.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

We humans appear on the cosmic calendar so recently that our recorded history occupies only the last few seconds of the last minute of December 31st.

We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands.

Maxwell's Equations have had a greater impact on human history than any ten presidents.

We live in a vast and awesome universe in which, daily, suns are made and worlds destroyed, where humanity clings to an obscure clod of rock.

Football is a thinly disguised re-enactment of hunting; we played it before we were human.

Organic as a dandelion seed, [the ship of our imagination] will carry us to worlds of dreams and worlds of facts

Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition.