Quote

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out.

Carl Sagan

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Carl Sagan
Age: 62 †
Born: 1934
Born: November 9
Died: 1996
Died: December 20
Astronomer
Astrophysicist
Cosmologist
Naturalist
Non-Fiction Writer
Novelist
Physicist
Planetary Scientist
Science Communicator
Brooklyn
New York
Carl Edward Sagan
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
World
Chance
Turns
Permitted
Learn
Delighted
History
Personally
Death
Discover
Others
Continue
Would
Gave
Life
Especially

More quotes by Carl Sagan

Image
There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.
Carl Sagan
Image
Discussing the possibilities of extraterrestrial life: I would love it even if they were short, sullen, grumpy and sexually obsessed. But there just isn't any good evidence.
Carl Sagan
Image
The illegality of cannabis is outrageous.
Carl Sagan
Image
The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity.
Carl Sagan
Image
We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.
Carl Sagan
Image
The visions we offer our children shape the future. It _matters_ what those visions are. Often they become self-fulfilling prophecies. Dreams are maps.
Carl Sagan
Image
If you want to save your child from polio, you can pray or you can inoculate....Try science.
Carl Sagan
Image
We are...capable of using our compassion and our intelligence, our technology and our wealth, to make an abundant and meaningful life for every inhabitant of this planet. To enhance enormously our understanding of the Universe, and to carry us to the stars.
Carl Sagan
Image
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.
Carl Sagan
Image
We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos.
Carl Sagan
Image
Otherwise we don't run the government the government runs us
Carl Sagan
Image
We are star stuff harvesting sunlight.
Carl Sagan
Image
The method of science, as stodgy and grumpy as it may seem, is far more important than the findings of science.
Carl Sagan
Image
That kind of skeptical, questioning, don't accept what authority tells you attitude of science - is also nearly identical to the attitude of mind necessary for a functioning democracy. Science and democracy have very consonant values and approaches, and I don't think you can have one without the other.
Carl Sagan
Image
The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.
Carl Sagan
Image
Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.
Carl Sagan
Image
If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power.
Carl Sagan
Image
Advances in medicine and agriculture have saved vastly more lives than have been lost in all the wars in history.
Carl Sagan
Image
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.
Carl Sagan
Image
You mustn't think of the Universe as a wilderness. It hasn't been that for billions of years, he said. Think of it more as... ..cultivated.
Carl Sagan