Carl Sagan Quotes - Page 3

Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there's no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it's an artefact from times long gone.

Perhaps the depth of love can be calibrated by the number of different selves that are actively involved in a given relationship.

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

We are all star stuff.

Science is based on experiment, on a willingness to challenge old dogma, on an openness to see the universe as it really is. Accordingly, science sometimes requires courage - at the very least the courage to question the conventional wisdom.

The way to find out about our place in the universe is by examining the universe and by examining ourselves - without preconceptions, with as unbiased a mind as we can muster.

[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.

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.

We can't help it. Life looks for life.

She had studied the universe all her life, but had overlooked its clearest message: For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

A blade of grass is a commonplace on Earth; it would be a miracle on Mars. Our descendants on Mars will know the value of a patch of green. And if a blade of grass is priceless, what is the value of a human being?

We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.