Carl Sagan Quotes - Page 6

Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.

You have to know the past to understand the present.

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

[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in Cosmos]

In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think its forever.

The vast distances that separate the stars are providential. Beings and worlds are quarantined from one another. The quarantine is lifted only for those with sufficient self-knowledge and judgment to have safely traveled from star to star.

[an encounter in space] "Some celestial event. No-no words-no words to describe it. Poetry! They should have sent a poet. So beautiful. So beautiful...I had no idea. I had no idea.

We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library

A central lesson of science is that to understand complex issues (or even simple ones), we must try to free our minds of dogma and to guarantee the freedom to publish, to contradict, and to experiment. Arguments from authority are unacceptable.

It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power; we are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible, and which are not. …

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

At the heart of science is an essential tension between two seemingly contradictory attitueds-an openness to new ideas, no matter how bizarre or counterintuitive they may be, and the most ruthless skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, old and new.