Quotes from Carl Sagan

Los que tienen algo que vender, los que desean influir en la opinión pública, los que mandan, podría sugerir un escéptico, tienen un interés personal en no fomentar el escepticismo.

Science may have evicted ghosts and witches from our beliefs

The book was better than the movie. For one thing, there was a lot more in it. And some of the pictures were awfully different from the movie.

Vigorous criticism is more constructive in science than in some other areas of human endeavor because in science there are adequate standards of validity that can be agreed upon by competent practitioners the world over. The objective of such criticism is not to suppress but rather to encourage the advance of new ideas: those that survive a firm skeptical scrutiny have a fighting chance of being right, or at least useful.

The brain must function during the renovation […] The old parts are in charge of too many fundamental functions for them to be replaced altogether. So they wheeze along, out of-date and sometimes counterproductive, but a necessary consequence of our evolution.

Que haya cosas que el observador ordinario, o incluso el experto, no entiende, es inevitable.

And after the Earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it is burned t a crisp or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being- and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth

We lack consensus about our place in the Universe. There is no generally agreed upon long-term vision of the goal of our species—other than, perhaps, simple survival. Especially when times are hard, we become desperate for encouragement, unreceptive to the litany of great demotions and dashed hopes, and much more willing to hear that we're special, never mind if the evidence is paper-thin.

Para criaturas pequenas como nós, a vastidão só é suportável através do amor.

She tried to imagine it spinning, with millions of people glued to it, talking different languages, wearing funny clothes, all stuck to the same ball.

the more people killed in a war, the less likely it was to occur, and the longer before you could witness it, just as violent storms occur less frequently than cloudbursts. Richardson

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shining because of distant nuclear fusion. In

This planet is run by crazy people. Remember what they have to do to get where they are. Their perspective is so narrow, so... brief. A few years. In the best of them a few decades. They care only about the time they are in power.

Don't you ever feel . . . lost in your universe? How do you know what to do, how to behave, if there's no God? Just obey the law or get arrested?" "You're not worried about being lost, Palmer. You're worried about not being central, not the reason the universe was created.

Think of the power of repetitive imagery in advertising, especially to suggestible viewers and readers. It can make us believe almost anything—even that smoking cigarettes is cool.

If we can accomplish the integration of the search without obliterating cultural differences or destroying ourselves, we will have accomplished a great thing.

Hay un geocentrismo práctico en nuestra vida diaria. Todavía hablamos del Sol que sale y se pone, en lugar de hablar de una Tierra que gira. Todavía pensamos en un universo organizado para nuestro beneficio y poblado tan sólo por nosotros. La exploración del espacio, en este sentido, nos hará ser un poco más humildes.

We are too small and our statecraft is too feeble to be seen by a spacecraft between the Earth and the Moon. From this vantage point, our obsession with nationalism is nowhere in evidence.

Exponential increases in population will dominate any arithmetic increases, even those brought about by heroic technological initiatives, in the availability of food and resources, as Malthus long ago realized. While some industrial nations have approached zero population growth, this is not the case for the world as a whole.

As ages passed, people learned from their ancestors. The more accurately you knew the position and movements of the Sun and Moon and stars, the more reliably you could predict when to hunt, when to sow and reap, when to gather the tribes. As precision of measurement improved, records had to be kept, so astronomy encouraged observation and mathematics and the development of writing.

Çok bilmek, çok zeki olmakla eÅŸ deÄŸer deÄŸildir. Ak?l yaln?zca bilgi demek deÄŸildir, ayn? zamanda yarg?d?r da. BaÅŸka bir deyiÅŸle, bilgiler aras?nda baÄŸlant? kurup bunlar? kullanmakt?r.

the extraordinary should certainly be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Solo el silencio es grandioso; todo lo demás es debilidad. ALFRED DE VIGNY

I'm frequently asked, "Do you believe there's extraterrestrial intelligence?" I give the standard arguments—there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so on.