1,131 Quotes by Carl Sagan

You’re an interesting species. An interesting mix. You’re capable of such beautiful dreams, and such horrible nightmares. You feel so lost, so cut off, so alone, only you’re not. See, in all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable, is each other.

For ages men had used sticks to club and spear each other – Anaximander of Miletus used the stick to measure time.

The more we want it to be true, the more careful we have to be. No witness’s say-so is good enough. People make mistakes. People play practical jokes. People stretch the truth for money or attention or fame. People occasionally misunderstand what they’re seeing. People sometimes even see things that aren’t there.

What a marvelous cooperative arrangement – plants and animals each inhaling each other’s exhalations, a kind of planet-wide mutual mouth-to-stoma resuscitation, the entire elegant cycle powered by a star 150 million kilometers away.

There is a place with four suns in the sky-red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them. I know of a world with a million moons. I know of a sun the size of the Earth-and made of diamond... The universe is vast and awesome, and for the first time we are becoming part of it.

Science is only a Latin word for knowledge.

Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there’s no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it’s an artefact from times long gone.

Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the monkeys and apes casually knock them down – toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings on Earth.

Virtually every major technological advance in the history of the human species – back to the invention of stone tools and the domestication of fire – has been ethically ambiguous.