1,131 Quotes by Carl Sagan

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there’s no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

Demon mean knowledge in Greek, especially about the material world. Science means knowledge in Latin. A jurisdictional dispute is exposed, even if we look no further.

Maybe it’s a little early. Maybe the time is not quite yet. But those other worlds – promising untold opportunities – beckon. Silently, they orbit the Sun, waiting.

In the long run, the aggressive civilizations destroy themselves, almost always. It’s their nature. They can’t help it.

A handful of sand contains about 10,000 grains, more than the number of stars we can see with the naked eye on a clear night. But the number of stars we can see is only the tiniest fraction of the number of stars that are. What we see at night is the merest smattering of the nearest stars. Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

The politicians and the religious leaders and the weapons scientists have been at it for a long time and they’ve made a thorough mess of it. I mean, we’re in deep trouble.

Except for hydrogen, all the atoms that make each of us up – the iron in our blood, the calcium in our bones, the carbon in our brains – were manufactured in red giant stars thousands of light-years away in space and billions of years ago in time. We are, as I like to say, starstuff.

What’s the harm of a little mystification? It sure beats boring statistical analyses.

It’s hard to kill a creature once it lets you see its consciousness.