Carl Sagan Quotes

No other planet in the solar system is a suitable home for human beings; it’s this world or nothing. That’s a very powerful perception.

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

We are the universe experiencing itself.

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

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.

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers.

We live on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

The absence of evidence is not the evidence of absence.

Be grateful everyday for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.

The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It’s not that there’s something new in our way of thinking – it’s that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

You can’t convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it’s based on a deep seated need to believe

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.