Explore Quotes by Carl Sagan

Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions.

We are made of star-stuff. Our bodies are made of star-stuff. There are pieces of star within us all.

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.

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.

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

There are lots of ways to communicate what we know, but few ways to communicate what we feel. Music is one way to communicate emotions.

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

The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.

We are, in the most profound sense, children of the Cosmos.

The open road still softly calls, like a nearly forgotten song of childhood

Better the hard truth, I say, than the comforting fantasy. And in the final tolling it often turns out that the facts are more comforting than the fantasy.

Don't judge everyone else by your own limited experience.

Our loyalties are to the species and the planet. We speak for Earth.

The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.

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

The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.

After the earth dies, some 5 billion years from now, after it's burned to a crisp, or even swallowed by the Sun, there will be other worlds and stars and galaxies coming into being - and they will know nothing of a place once called Earth.

If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.

A proclivity for science is embedded deeply within us, in all times, places, and cultures. It has been the means for our survival. It is our birthright. When, through indifference, inattention, incompetence, or fear of skepticism, we discourage children from science, we are disenfranchisin g them, taking from them the tools needed to manage their future.

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation

Ask courageous questions. Do not be satisfied with superficial answers.