Quotes from Carl Sagan

God pity a one-dream man.

Edmund Way Teale in his 1950 book Circle of the Seasons understood the dilemma better: It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it.

The same few dozen organic molecules are used over and over again in biology for the widest variety of functions.

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

In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries you could travel from Holland to China in a year or two, the time it has taken Voyager to travel from Earth to Jupiter.

Nearly every scientist has experienced, in a moment of discovery or sudden understanding, a reverential astonishment. Science - pure science, science not for any practical application but for its own sake - is a deeply emotional matter for those who practise it, as well as for those nonscientists who every now and then dip in to see what's been discovered lately.

The key point of the Tunguska Event is that there was a tremendous explosion, a great shock wave, an enormous forest fire, and yet there is no impact crater at the site. There seems to be only one explanation consistent with all the facts: In 1908 a piece of a comet hit the Earth.

The approach to Earth of Halley's Comet in the year 66 is the probable explanation of the account by Josephus of a sword that hung over Jerusalem for a whole year. In 1066 the Normans witnessed another return of Halley's Comet. Since it must, they thought, presage the fall of some kingdom, the comet encouraged, in some sense precipitated, the invasion of England by William the Conqueror. The comet was duly noted in a newspaper of the time, the Bayeux Tapestry.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we've been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We're no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It's simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we've been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back. So the old bamboozles tend to persist as the new ones rise.

Our purportedly advanced civilization may be changing the delicate ecological balance that has tortuously evolved over the 4-billion-year period of life on Earth.

Those who seek power at any price detect a societal weakness, a fear that they can ride into office. It could be ethnic differences, as it was then, perhaps different amounts of melanin in the skin; different philosophies or religions; or maybe it's drug use, violent crime, economic crisis, school prayer, or "desecrating" (literally, making unholy) the flag.

The fact that we cannot now produce a detailed understanding of, say, altered states of consciousness in terms of brain chemistry no more implies the existence of a 'spirit world' than a sunflower following the sun in its course across the sky was evidence of a literal miracle before we knew about phototropism and plant hormones.

Each Voyager is itself a message. In their exploratory intent, in the lofty ambition of their objectives, in their utter lack of intent to do harm, and in the brilliance of their design and performance, these robots speak eloquently for us.

Think of the rivers of blood, spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters, of a fraction of a dot...our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe - are challenged by that point of pale light.

Hay preguntas ingenuas, preguntas tediosas, preguntas malformuladas, preguntas planteadas con una inadecuada autocrítica. Pero toda pregunta es un clamor por entender el mundo. No hay preguntas estúpidas.

Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

Microbiology and meteorology now explain what only a few centuries ago was considered sufficient cause to burn women to death.

I Ã¢â'¬Â¦ had ambition not only to go farther than anyone had done before," wrote Captain James Cook, the eighteenth-century explorer of the Pacific, "but as far as it was possible for man to go.

Geometry existed before the Creation. It is co-eternal with the mind of God Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Geometry provided God with a model for the Creation Ã¢â'¬Â¦ Geometry is God Himself." In

Condon, quick on his feet, replied that the accusation was untrue. He was not a revolutionary in physics. He raised his right hand: "I believe in Archimedes' Principle, formulated in the third century B.C. I believe in Kepler's laws of planetary motion, discovered in the seventeenth century. I believe in Newton's laws.…" And on he went, invoking the illustrious names of Bernoulli, Fourier, Ampère, Boltzmann, and Maxwell.

Because science carries us toward an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be, its findings may not in all cases be immediately comprehensible or satisfying. It may take a little work to restructure our mindsets. Some of science is very simple. When it gets complicated, that's usually because the world is complicated—or because we're complicated.

If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.

Huygens was, of course, a citizen of his time. Who of us is not? He claimed science as his religion and then argued that the planets must be inhabited because otherwise God had made worlds for nothing.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge