Quotes from Carl Sagan

Before women got the vote, there were no nuclear weapons);

Claro que si uno tuviera un receptor con paso de banda estrecha, y escuchara solo un mínimo margen de frecuencias, estaría obligado a aceptar la constante de tiempo larga. Jamás podríamos detectar una modulación rápida. Eso era una simple consecuencia del Teorema Integral de Fourier, estrechamente vinculado con el Principio de Incertidumbre de Heisenberg.

In human history there a precious few whose memory we revere because they knowingly sacrificed themselves for others. For each of them, there are multitudes who did nothing.

there would be one more acknowledged instance of the American public being misled or lied to in the interest of national security.

A survey shows that more college graduates are homosexual than those with lesser education; therefore education makes people gay.

What she detested most was the absolute unselfconsciousness of her ego. It made no apologies, gave no quarter, and plunged on. It was unwholesome. She knew it would be impossible to tear it out, root and branch. She would have to work on it patiently, reason with it, distract it, maybe even threaten it.

Uma marca infalível do amor à verdade", escreveu John Locke em 1690, "é não considerar nenhuma proposição com uma convicção maior do que a autorizada pelas provas em que se fundamenta.

science carries us towards an understanding of how the world is, rather than how we would wish it to be [...]

Language can free us of feeling, or almost. Maybe that's one of its functions... so we can uderstand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it

Life is profligate, blind at this level unconcerned with notions of justice. It can afford to waste multitudes.

Books permit us to voyage through time, to tap the wisdom of our ancestors. The library connects us with the insights 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 of our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.

A still more glorious dawn awaits.

the hopeless sense of a civilization destroyed for nothing; the knowledge that we could have prevented it and did not.

Somewhere in the steaming jungles of the Carboniferous Period there emerged an organism that for the first time in the history of the world had more information in its brains than in its genes. It was an early reptile which, were we to come upon it in these sophisticated times, we would probably not describe as exceptionally intelligent… Much of the history of life since the Carboniferous Period can be described as the gradual (and certainly incomplete) dominance of brains over genes.

It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.

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. p283

Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us—there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries.

When enough fiction is written and enough scientific hypotheses are proposed, sooner or later there will be accidental concordances.

In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe Few found the similarity suspicious.

Until fairly recently it was thought that humans had fortv-eight chromosomes in an ordinary somatic cell. We now know that the correct number is forty-six. Chimps apparently really do have forty-eight chromosomes, and in this case a viable cross of a chimpanzee and a human would in any event be rare.

El reduccionismo no parece conceder un respeto suficiente a la complejidad del universo. A algunos se les antoja como un híbrido curioso de arrogancia y pereza intelectual.

I believe in Spinoza's God, who revealed himself in the harmony of all being, not in the God who concerns himself with the fate and actions of men"—a more subtle religious view embraced by many theologians today.

O método da ciência, por mais enfadonho e ranzinza que pareça, é muito mais importante do que as descobertas dela.

Freedom of belief is pernicious," Bellarmine wrote on another occasion. "It is nothing but the freedom to be wrong.