Quotes About Carl Sagan

Given a hundred clones of Carl Sagan, we might have some hope for the next century.

I believe our future depends powerfully on how well we understand this cosmos in which we float, like a mote of dust in the morning sky.

An atheist has to know a lot more than I know. An atheist is someone who knows there is no god. By some definitions atheism is very stupid.

Mythology is about Good VS Evil, is it not? We can pretend runes and astrology and reading tea leaves...But to whom do we pray when we are terrified? Carl Sagan's essays?

'Carl Sagan: A Life,' though a riveting tale, tells as much about the all-too-human feelings of jealousy and resentment as it does about the individual who inspired them.

Has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? . . . No other human institution comes close.

You probably don't need more weapons than what's required to destroy every city on earth. There's only 2,300 cities. So, the United States, by that criteria, only needs 2,300 nuclear weapons - well, we've got more than 25,000!

The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.

The size and age of the Cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home.

I think I set myself on a course to become a scientist around about the time that Carl Sagan's 'Cosmos' series was on television, and there really was no going back for me at that point, and then I went on to study space science and then get my Ph.D., then go aboard and work in the European Space Agency.

For years I've been stressing with regard to UFOs that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

Chlorine is a deadly poison gas employed on European battlefields in World War 1. Sodium is a corrosive metal which burns upon contact with water. Together they make a placid and unpoisonous material, table salt. Why each of these substances has the properties it does is a subject called chemistry, which requires more than 10 bits of information to understand. Carl Sagan

I don't believe I can let this subject pass by leaving my own conflicted emotions unconfessed. When Carl Sagan won the Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction in 1978, I dismissed it as a minor achievement for a scientist, scarcely worth listing. When I won the same prize the following year, it wondrously became a major literary award of which scientists should take special note.

In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.

But, yeah, it was a totally weird place, looking back. But the right kind of weird. Good weird. The nuns had a lot of freedom. We read Carl Sagan before the Old Testament.

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.

I've written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

Skeptical scientists often point out, as Carl Sagan has, that the wonders of real science far surpass the supposed wonders of fringe science. I think it is possible to invert that idea, and to say that the wonders of real consciousness far surpass what conventional science admits can exist.

With their radio telescopes they can capture wisps of radiation so preposterously faint that the total amount of energy collected from outside the solar system by all of them together since collecting began (in 1951) is 'less than the energy of a single snowflake striking the ground'2, in the words of Carl Sagan. In

The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996 :] If 'fulfilled prophecy' is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of fulfilled prophecy? Consider, for example, eclipses.

Science is a way to call the bluff of those who only pretend to knowledge. It is a bulwark against mysticism, against superstition, against religion misapplied to where it has no business being.

The major religions on the Earth contradict each other left and right. You can't all be correct. And what if all of you are wrong? It's a possibility, you know. You must care about the truth, right? Well, the way to winnow through all the differing contentions is to be skeptical. I'm not any more skeptical about your religious beliefs than I am about every new scientific idea I hear about. But in my line of work, they're called hypotheses, not inspiration and not revelation.