• Categories
  • Carl Sagan Quotes   592
  • 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
  • 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
  • There is no other species on Earth that does science. It is, so far, entirely a human invention, evolved by natural selection in the cerebral cortex for one simple reason: it works. It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Simple Quotes , Self Quotes
  • Indeed the reasoned criticism of a prevailing belief is a service to the proponents of that belief; if they are incapable of defending it, they are well advised to abandon it. This self-questioning and error-correcting aspect of the scientific method is its most striking property.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Errors Quotes , Self Questioning Quotes
  • It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery. But is it not stirring to understand how the world actually works — that white light is made of colors, that color is the way we perceive the wavelengths of light, that transparent air reflects light, that in so doing it discriminates among the waves, and that the sky is blue for the same reason that the sunset is red? It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Passion Quotes , Sunset Quotes
  • For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads, ‘We came in peace for all Mankind.’ As the United States was dropping seven and a half megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Moon Quotes , Rocks Quotes
  • The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn't a real god. They didn't believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn't believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Christian Quotes , Atheist Quotes
  • Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Inspirational Quotes , Life Quotes
  • In Italy, the Inquisition was condemning people to death until the end of the eighteenth century, and inquisitional torture was not abolished in the Catholic Church until 1816. The last bastion of support for the reality of witchcraft and the necessity of punishment has been the Christian churches.
  • 5 years ago



    Tags : Carl Sagan Quotes , Christian Quotes , Atheist Quotes