Quote

History is full of people who out of fear, or ignorance, or lust for power has destroyed knowledge of immeasurable value which truly belongs to us all. We must not let it happen again.

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
Happens
Full
Truth
Happen
Immeasurable
Power
Opinion
Belongs
Must
Knowledge
Lust
People
Values
Destroyed
History
Ignorance
Fear
Truly
Political
Value

More quotes by Carl Sagan

Image
A still more glorious dawn awaits / not a sunrise, but a galaxy-rise / a morning filled with 400 billion suns / the rising of the milky way
Carl Sagan
Image
If chimpanzees have consciousness, if they are capable of abstractions, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'? How smart does a chimp have to be before killing him constitutes murder?
Carl Sagan
Image
Don't judge everyone else by your own limited experience.
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
You could just as well say that an agnostic is a deeply religious person with at least a rudimentary knowledge of human fallibility.
Carl Sagan
Image
Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation
Carl Sagan
Image
My view is that if there is no evidence for it, then forget about it. An agnostic is somebody who doesn’t believe in something until there is evidence for it, so I’m agnostic.
Carl Sagan
Image
We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.
Carl Sagan
Image
I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.
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
Religions contradict one another-on small matters, such as whether we should put on a hat or take one off on entering a house of worship, or whether we should eat beef and eschew pork or the other way around, all the way to the most central issues, such as whether there are no gods, one God, or many gods.
Carl Sagan
Image
The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.
Carl Sagan
Image
You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it.
Carl Sagan
Image
Except for children (who don't know enough not to ask the important questions), few of us spendtime wondering why nature is the way it is . . .
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
Image
A tiny blue dot set in a sunbeam. Here it is. That's where we live. That's home. We humans are one species and this is our world. It is our responsibility to cherish it. Of all the worlds in our solar system, the only one so far as we know, graced by life.
Carl Sagan
Image
The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]
Carl Sagan
Image
If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?
Carl Sagan
Image
Our passion for learning ... is our tool for survival.
Carl Sagan
Image
Science arouses a soaring sense of wonder. But so does pseudoscience. Sparse and poor popularizations of science abandon ecological niches that pseudoscience promptly fills. If it were widely understood that claims to knowledge require adequate evidence before they can be accepted, there would be no room for pseudoscience.
Carl Sagan