Top 610 Quotes & Sayings by Carl Sagan - Page 9

Scientists make mistakes. Accordingly, it is the job of the scientist to recognize our weakness, to examine the widest range of opinions, to be ruthlessly self-critical. Science is a collective enterprise with the error-correction machinery often running smoothly.

A galaxy is composed of gas and dust and stars - billions upon billions of stars. Every star may be a sun to someone.

Because men, compared to male chimps, have such relatively small testicles (large testicles indicate a species where many males mate, one after the other, with the same female), we might guess that promiscuous societies were uncommon in the immediate human past.

Eratosthenes's only tools were sticks, eyes, feet, and brains; plus a zest for experiment. With those tools he correctly deduced the circumference of the Earth, to high precision, with an error of only a few percent. That's pretty good figuring for 2200 years ago.

After I give lectures-on almost any subject-I am often asked, "Do you believe in UFOs?" I'm always struck by how the question is phrased, the suggestion that this is a matter of belief and not evidence. I'm almost never asked, "How good is the evidence that UFOs are alien spaceships?"

Curiosity and the urge to solve problems are the emotional hallmarks of our species.

Goddard represented a unique combination of visionary dedication and technological brilliance. He studied physics because he needed physics to get to Mars. In reading the notebooks of Robert Goddard, I am struck by how powerful his exploratory and scientific motivations were - and how influental speculative ideas, even erroneous ones, can be on the shaping of the future.

There are more potential combinations of DNA [physical forms] than there are atoms in the universe.

I never said it. Honest. Oh, I said there are maybe 100 billion galaxies and 10 billion trillion stars. It's hard to talk about the Cosmos without using big numbers. I said "billion" many times on the Cosmos television series, which was seen by a great many people. But I never said "billions and billions." For one thing, it's too imprecise. How many billions are "billions and billions"? A few billion? Twenty billion? A hundred billion? "Billions and billions" is pretty vague. When we reconfigured and updated the series, I checked-and sure enough, I never said it.

One of the great commandments of science is, 'Mistrust arguments from authority'. (Scientists, being primates, and thus given to dominance hierarchies, of course do not always follow this commandment.)

Whatever the reason you're on Mars, I'm glad you're there, and I wish I was with you.

When permitted to listen to alternative opinions and engage in substantive debate, people have been known to change their minds. It can happen.

Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group.

Thus the recent rapid evolution of human intelligence is not only the cause of but also the only conceivable solution to the many serious problems that beset us.

Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star.

Those afraid of the universe as it really is, those who pretend to nonexistent knowledge and envision a Cosmos centered on human beings will prefer the fleeting comforts of superstition.

Cutting off fundamental, curiosity-driven science is like eating the seed corn. We may have a little more to eat next winter but what will we plant so we and our children will have enough to get through the winters to come?

We invest far off places with a certain romance... Long summers, mild winters, rich harvests, plentiful game; none of them lasts for ever. Your own life, or your bands, or even your species - might be owed to a restless few, drawn by a craving they can hardly articulate or understand, to undiscovered lands, and new worlds.

I would love to believe that when I die I will live again, that some thinking, feeling, remembering part of me will continue.

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have.

Is it fair to be suspicious of an entire profession because of a few bad apples? There are at least two important differences, it seems to me. First, no one doubts that science actually works, whatever mistaken and fraudulent claim may from time to time be offered. But whether there are any miraculous cures from faith-healing, beyond the body's own ability to cure itself, is very much at issue. Secondly, the expose' of fraud and error in science is made almost exclusively by science. But the exposure of fraud and error in faith-healing is almost never done by other faith-healers.

Any civilization that doesn't develop space travel dies.

At the extremes it is difficult to distinguish pseudoscience from rigid, doctrinaire religion.

All inquires carry with them some element of risk. There is no guarantee that the universe will conform to our predispositions.

Quickly capping 363 oil well fires in a war zone is impossible. The fires would burn out of control until they put themselves out... The resulting soot might well stretch over all of South Asia... It could be carried around the world... [and] the consequences could be dire. Beneath such a pall sunlight would be dimmed, temperatures lowered and droughts more frequent. Spring and summer frosts may be expected... This endangerment of the food supplies... appears to be likely enough that it should affect the war plans.

We have entered, almost without noticing, an age of exploration and discovery unparalleled since the Renaissance.

If all the suns but ours collapsed tonight, how many lifetimes would it take us to realize that we were alone?

The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.

Science is a collaborative enterprise, spanning the generations. When it permits us to see the far side of some new horizon, we remember those who prepared the way - seeing for them also.

Few scientists now dispute that today's soaring levels of carbon dioxide and other gases in the atmosphere will cause global temperature averages to rise by as much as nine degrees Fahrenheit sometime after the year 2000.

The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they've made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we're in deep trouble.

The wind whips through the canyons of the American Southwest, and there is no one to hear it but us - a reminder of the 40,000 generations of thinking men and women who preceded us, about whom we know almost nothing, upon whom our civilization is based.

Any faith that admires truth, that strives to know God, must be brave enough to accommodate the universe.

My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings - what we sometimes call "mind" - are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.

Accommodation to change, the thoughtful pursuit of alternative futures are keys to the survival of civilization and perhaps of the human species.

Both the Freudian and the Platonic metaphors emphasize the considerable independence of and tension among the constituent parts of the psyche, a point that characterizes the human condition.

What began in deadly competition has helped us to see that global cooperation is the essential precondition for our survival. Travel is broadening. It's time to hit the road again.

We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world.

When Kepler found his long-cherished belief did not agree with the most precise observation, he accepted the uncomfortable fact. He preferred the hard truth to his dearest illusions, that is the heart of science.

Modern Darwinism makes it abundantly clear that many less ruthless traits, some not always admired by robber barons and Fuhrers - altruism, general intelligence, compassion - may be the key to survival.

A multitude of aspects of the natural world that were considered miraculous only a few generations ago are now thoroughly understood in terms of physics and chemistry.

UFOs: The reliable cases are uninteresting and in the interesting cases are unreliable.

What's the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses.

We are made of star stuff. For the most part, atoms heavier than hydrogen were created in the interiors of stars and then expelled into space to be incorporated into later stars. The Sun is probably a third generation star.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.

The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.

How lucky we are to live in this time / the first moment in human history / when we are in fact visiting other worlds

Cleverly designed experiments are the key.

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

The cosmos is all there is, all there ever was, and all there ever will be.

I would be very ashamed of my civilization if we did not try to find out if there is life in outer space.

Any sufficiently crisp question can be answered by a single binary digit-0 or 1, yes or no.

We are star stuff which has taken its destiny into its own hands. The loom of time and space works the most astonishing transformations of matter.

Science is only a Latin word for knowledge

On the day that we do discover that we are not alone, our society may begin to evolve and transform in some incredible and wondrous new ways.

The immense distances to the stars and the galaxies mean that we see everything ins pace int he past, some as they were before the Earth came to be. Telescopes are time machines.

In the vastness of the Cosmos there must be other civilizations far older and more advanced than ours.

The fossil record implies trial and error, an inability to anticipate the future, features inconsistent with an efficient Great Designer (although not with a Designer of a more remote and indirect temperament)

I find science so much more fascinating than science fiction. It also has the advantage of being true.

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