Quote

Our intelligence is imperfect, surely, and newly arisen the ease with which it can be sweet-talked, overwhelmed, or subverted by other hardwired propensities - sometimes themselves disguised as the cool light of reason - is worrisome.

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
Sometimes
Surely
Hardwired
Ease
Arisen
Cool
Newly
Intelligence
Disguised
Sweet
Propensity
Light
Overwhelmed
Subverted
Truth
Imperfect
Worrisome
Reason
Talked
Propensities

More quotes by Carl Sagan

Image
Much of human history can, I think, be described as a gradual and sometimes painful liberation from provincialism, the emerging awareness that there is more to the world than was generally believed by our ancestors.
Carl Sagan
Image
Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
Carl Sagan
Image
The understanding of the intent of the artist which I can achieve when high sometimes carries over to when I’m down. This is one of many human frontiers which cannabis has helped me traverse.
Carl Sagan
Image
While our behavior is still significantly controlled by our genetic inheritance, we have, through our brains, a much richer opportunity to blaze new behavioral and cultural pathways on short timescales.
Carl Sagan
Image
The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Carl Sagan
Image
It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it.
Carl Sagan
Image
The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.
Carl Sagan
Image
I don't want to believe. I want to know.
Carl Sagan
Image
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
Carl Sagan
Image
One trend that bothers me is the glorification of stupidity, that the media is reassuring people it's alright not to know anything. That to me is far more dangerous than a little pornography on the Internet.
Carl Sagan
Image
For all our failings, despite our limitations and fallibilities, we humans are capable of greatness.
Carl Sagan
Image
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.
Carl Sagan
Image
We are the universe experiencing itself.
Carl Sagan
Image
If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
Carl Sagan
Image
The Platonists and their Christian successors held the peculiar notion that the Earth was tainted and somehow nasty, while the heavens were perfect and divine. The fundamental idea that the Earth is a planet, that we are citizens of the Universe, was rejected and forgotten.
Carl Sagan
Image
In all our searching, the only thing we've found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.
Carl Sagan
Image
In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.
Carl Sagan
Image
Imagine we could accelerate continuously at 1 g-what we're comfortable with on good old terra firma-to the midpoint of our voyage, and decelerate continuously at 1 g until we arrive at our destination. It would take a day to get to Mars, a week and a half to Pluto, a year to the Oort Cloud, and a few years to the nearest stars.
Carl Sagan
Image
A stars rich in europium of distant galaxies analyzed through the collective light of a hundred billion constituent stars. Astronomical spectroscopy is an almost magical technique. It amazes me still. Auguste Comte picked a particularly unfortunate example.
Carl Sagan
Image
The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.
Carl Sagan