Quotes from Carl Sagan

in the forty-five years centered on 1910, the nature of the atom was first understood—partly by shooting pieces of atoms at atoms and watching how they bounce off.

And what is the evidence for this conclusion? Chiefly, it is the 11th and 12th verses of Luke, Chapter 21, in which Jesus talks about "great signs from Heaven"—nothing like a UFO is described—in the last days. Typically, Lindsey ignores verse 32, in which Jesus makes it very clear he is talking about events in the first, not the twentieth, century.

She came to admire him so much that his love for her affected her own self-esteem: She liked herself better because of him.

All of us long for a competent, uncorrupt, charismtatic leader. We will leap at the opportunity to support, to believe, to feel good.

President Dwight Eisenhower expressing astonishment and alarm on discovering that fully half of all Americans have below average intelligence);

In a way, science might be described as paranoid thinking applied to Nature: we are looking for natural conspiracies, for connections among apparently disparate data. Our objective is to abstract patterns from Nature (right-hemisphere thinking), but many proposed patterns do not in fact correspond to the data. Thus all proposed patterns must be subjected to the sieve of critical analysis (left-hemisphere thinking).

Attribute the declining life expectancy in the former Soviet Union to the failures of communism many years ago, but never attribute the high infant mortality rate in the United States (now highest of the major industrial nations) to the failures of capitalism.

The Cosmos may be densely populated with intelligent beings. But the Darwinian lesson is clear: There will be no humans elsewhere. Only here. Only on this small planet. We are a rare as well as an endangered species. Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

Una de las lecciones más tristes de la historia es ésta: si se está sometido a un engaño demasiado tiempo, se tiende a rechazar cualquier prueba de que es un engaño.

Modern Roman Catholicism has no quarrel with the Big Bang, with a Universe 15 billion or so years old, with the first living things arising from prebiological molecules, or with humans evolving

The most brilliant youngsters are a national and a global resource.

In science we may start with experimental results, data, observations, measurements, 'facts'. We invent, if we can, a rich array of possible explanations and systematically confront each explanation with the facts.

And were the vision of Democritus to have been adopted by Western civilization, instead of being cast aside for the pale views of Plato and Aristotle, we would be vastly further ahead today, in

The study of the global climate, the comparison of the Earth with other worlds, are subjects in their earliest stages of development. They are fields that are poorly and grudgingly funded. In our ignorance, we continue to push and pull, to pollute the atmosphere and brighten the land, oblivious of the fact that the long-term consequences are largely unknown.

La ciencia no es solamente compatible con la espiritualidad, sino que es una profunda fuente de espiritualidad.

Beep glagga beep wonk beep beep.

But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable.

A single lifetime, even though entirely devoted to the sky, would not be enough for the investigation of so vast a subject 

Every time a scientific paper presents a bit of data, it's accompanied by an error bar – a quiet but insistent reminder that no knowledge is complete or perfect. It's a calibration of how much we trust what we think we know. If the error bars are small, the accuracy of our empirical knowledge is high; if the error bars are large, then so is the uncertainty in our knowledge.

Could my fondness for materials have something to do with the fact the I am made chiefly of them?

The method of science is tried and true. It is not perfect, it's just the best we have. And to abandon it, with its skeptical protocols, is the pathway to a dark age.

According to the World Health Organization, smoking kills three million people every year worldwide.

He sought a way to preserve the past. John Hershel was one of the founders of a new form of time travel.... a means to capture light and memories. He actually coined a word for it... photography. When you think about it, photography is a form of time travel. This man is staring at us from across the centuries, a ghost preserved by light.

We must surrender our skepticism only in the face of rock-solid evidence. Science demands a tolerance for ambiguity.