Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

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

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

In our obscurity - in all this vastness - there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

The dangers of not thinking clearly are much greater now than ever before. It's not that there's something new in our way of thinking - it's that credulous and confused thinking can be much more lethal in ways it was never before.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

When you make the finding yourself - even if you're the last person on Earth to see the light - you'll never forget it.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep thoughts can be winnowed from deep nonsense.