Quotes from Carl Sagan

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow man. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. . . .

If we like them, they're freedom fighters, she thought. If we don't like them, they're terrorists. In the unlikely case we can't make up our minds, they're temporarily only guerrillas.

We humans might have evolved too far. The price for being intelligent enough to be the first species to be fully aware of the cosmos might just be a capacity to feel a whole universe's worth of darkness.

History is full of people who out of fear or ignorance or the lust for power have destroyed treasures of immeasurable value which truly belong to all of us. We must not let it happen again.

Home, you think. Home. This is my world. This is where I come from. Everyone I know, everyone I ever heard of, grew up down there, under that relentless and exquisite blue.

Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. — Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. — Pale Blue Dot, 1994

There were many women in the Soviet scientific community, proportionately more so than in the United States. But they tended to occupy menial middle-level positions, and male Soviet scientists, like their American counterparts, were puzzled about a pretty woman with evident scientific competence who forcefully expressed her views.

Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.

I went to the librarian and asked for a book about stars... and the answer was stunning. It was that the Sun was a star but really close. The stars were suns, but so far away they were just little points of light. The scale of the universe suddenly opened up to me. It was a kind of religious experience. There was a magnificence to it, a grandeur, a scale which has never left me. Never ever left me.

Major scientific insights are characteristically intuitive, and equally characteristically described in scientific papers by linear analytical arguments. There is no anomaly in this: it is, rather, just as it should be. The creative act has major right-hemisphere components. But arguments on the validity of the result are largely left-hemisphere functions.

We're worried - and for good reason - about what it means for the human future if we have only ourselves to rely upon.

Cosmos is all That is, Or Ever Was, Or ever Will BE.

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

Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it's incubi and succibi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that's where our hypnogogic imagery tends.

We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos.

Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of magic

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and our willingness to embrace what's true rather than what feels good.

The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of star stuff

afirmações extraordinárias requerem evidência extraordinária.

Um dragão que cospe fogo pelas ventas vive na minha garagem - O Mundo assombrado pelos demônios.

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

Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature.