Carl Sagan Quotes

American astrophysicist, cosmologist and author (1934–1996)

Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect. He testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect will change the earth's climate system.

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Native Name: Carl Edward Sagan

Alternative Names: Sagan • Carl E. Sagan • Carl E Sagan • C. E. Sagan • C.E. Sagan • C E Sagan • C. Sagan • C Sagan • Sagan C • Sagan C. • Sagan C. E. • Sagan CE

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An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth — scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books — might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it. What kind of society could we create if, instead, we drummed into them science and a sense of hope?

Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

The U.S. Library of Congress has recently designated Cosmos one of the eighty-eight books “that shaped America.

Except by sealing the brain off into separate airtight compartments, how is it possible to fly in airplanes, listen to the radio or take antibiotics while holding that the Earth is around 10,000 years old or that all Sagittarians are gregarious and affable?

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

We humans look rather different from a tree. Without a doubt we perceive the world differently than a tree does. But down deep, at the molecular heart of life, the trees and we are essentially identical.

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

If anything like this is true, then we would be denied even our self-congratulatory distinction of being the only animal that makes self-congratulatory distinctions.

No question; language can free us of feeling, or almost,' der Heer replied, stroking her shoulder. 'Maybe that's one of its functions - so we can understand the world without becoming entirely overwhelmed by it.

Isolation, even if incomplete, breeds diversity.

In college, in the early 1950s, I began to learn a little about how science works, the secrets of its great success, how rigorous the standards of evidence must be if we are really to know something is true, how many false starts and dead ends have plagued human thinking, how our biases can colour our interpretation of evidence, and how often belief systems widely held and supported by the political, religious and academic hierarchies turn out to be not just slightly in error, but grotesquely wrong.

But the history of science — by far the most successful claim to knowledge accessible to humans — teaches that the most we can hope for is successive improvement in our understanding, learning from our mistakes, an asymptotic approach to the Universe, but with the proviso that absolute certainty will always elude us. We will always be mired in error. The most each generation can hope for is to reduce the error bars a little, and to add to the body of data to which error bars apply. The error bar is a pervasive, visible self-assessment of the reliability of our knowledge.

There are many hypotheses in science that are wrong. That's perfectly alright; it's the aperture to finding out what's right. Science is a self-correcting process. To be accepted, new ideas must survive the most rigorous standards of evidence and scrutiny.

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue. But much as I want to believe that, and despite the ancient and worldwide cultural traditions that assert an afterlife, I know of nothing to suggest that it is more than wishful thinking.
The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides.