Quotes from Carl Sagan

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

We hunger to understand, so we invent myths about how we imagine the world is constructed - and they're, of course, based upon what we know, which is ourselves and other animals. So we make up stories about how the world was hatched from a cosmic egg or created after the mating of cosmic deities or by some fiat of a powerful being.

The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble.

How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact visiting other worlds

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

In our time, we have sifted the sands of Mars, we have established a presence there, we have fulfilled a century of dreams!

Maybe it's a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds - promising untold opportunities - beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

For a long time the human instinct to understand was thwarted by facile religious explanations.

She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Most of the people that I deal with are human. So I've had a lot of experience with that.

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

We are not without empathetic terror when we open Pascal's 'Pensees' and read, 'I am the great silent spaces between worlds.'

In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

Today, we're still loaded down - and, to some extent, embarrassed - by ancient myths, but we respect them as part of the same impulse that has led to the modern, scientific kind of myth. But we now have the opportunity to discover, for the first time, the way the universe is in fact constructed as opposed to how we would wish it to be constructed.

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies.

Human beings grew up in forests; we have a natural affinity for them. How lovely a tree is, straining toward the sky.

And after we returned to the savannahs and abandoned the trees, did we long for those great graceful leaps and ecstatic moments of weightlessness in the shafts of sunlight of the forest roof?

But down deep, at the molecular heart of life we're essentially identical to trees.

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy.

[Kepler] preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, and that is the heart of science.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.

Discussing the possibilities of extraterrestrial life: I would love it even if they were short, sullen, grumpy and sexually obsessed. But there just isn't any good evidence.