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  • Carl Sagan Quotes   592
  • We've tended in our cosmologies to make things familiar. Despite all our best efforts, we've not been very inventive. In the West, Heaven is placid and fluffy, and Hell is like the inside of a volcano. In many stories, both realms are governed by dominance hierarchies headed by gods or devils. Monotheists talked about the king of kings. In every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe. Few found the similarity suspicious.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Running Quotes , Kings Quotes
  • National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Religious Quotes , Stars Quotes
  • By exploring other worlds we safeguard this one. By itself, I think this fact more than justifies the money our species has spent in sending ships to other worlds. It is our fate to live during one of the most perilous and, at the same time, one of the most hopeful chapters in human history.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Fate Quotes , Thinking Quotes
  • My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Two Quotes
  • When a honeybee dies it releases a death pheromone, a characteristic odour that signals the survivors to remove it from the hive. The corpse is promptly pushed and tugged out of the hive. The death pheromone is oleic acid. What happens if a live bee is dabbed with a drop of oleic acid? Then no matter how strapping and vigourous it might be, it is carried kicking and screaming out of the hive.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Survivor Quotes
  • There is much that science doesn't understand, many mysteries still to be resolved. In a Universe tens of billions of light-years across and some ten or fifteen billion years old, this may be the case forever. We are constantly stumbling on new surprises
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Light Quotes , Years Quotes
  • We on Earth have just awakened to the great oceans of space and time from which we have emerged. We are the legacy of 15 billion years of cosmic evolution. We have a choice: We can enhance life and come to know the universe that made us, or we can squander our 15 billion-year heritage in meaningless self-destruction. What happens in the first second of the next cosmic year depends on what we do, here and now, with our intelligence and our knowledge of the cosmos.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Ocean Quotes , Self Quotes
  • We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Animal Quotes , Men Quotes
  • After I give lectures-on almost any subject-I am often asked, "Do you believe in UFOs?" I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not evidence. I'm almost never asked, "How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?"
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Believe Quotes , Giving Quotes
  • I am not an atheist. An atheist is someone who has compelling evidence that there is no Judeo-Christian-Islamic God. I am not that wise, but neither do I consider there to be anything approaching adequate evidence for such a god. Why are you in such a hurry to make up your mind? Why not simply wait until there is compelling evidence?
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Christian Quotes , Wise Quotes
  • The Bill of Rights decoupled religion from the state, in part because so many religions were steeped in an absolutist frame of mind - each convinced that it alone had a monopoly on the truth and therefore eager for the state to impose this truth on others.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Rights Quotes , Mind Quotes
  • My long-time view about Christianity is that it represents an amalgam of two seemingly immiscible parts-the religion of Jesus and the religion of Paul. Thomas Jefferson attempted to excise the Pauline parts of the New Testament. There wasn't much left when he was done, but it was an inspiring document.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Jesus Quotes , Views Quotes
  • Think of how many religions attempt to validate themselves with prophecy. Think of how many people rely on these prophecies, however vague, however unfulfilled, to support or prop up their beliefs. Yet has there ever been a religion with the prophetic accuracy and reliability of science? ... No other human institution comes close.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Science Quotes , Thinking Quotes