27 Quotes About Carl-sagan

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.

Interviewer: Didn't Sagan want to believe?Druyan: he didn't want to believe. he wanted to know.

It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.

And what greater might do we possess as human beings than our capacity to question and to learn?

All inquiries carry with them some element of risk.

Arguments from authority carry little weight – authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.

I’ve obviously spent a lot of time thinking about myth and religion. I’ve also spent time with things like The Skeptical Inquirer magazine, and Carl Sagan’s book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark; but while I was reading them, I was thinking, “Yes, yes, yes; but don’t you need to maintain a core of solid, rock-hard belief to be an atheist in this world?” [Laughter.] I think what I really like is the idea of belief itself.

We are alive and we resonate with idea of life elsewhere, but only careful accumulation and assessment of the evidence can tell us whether a given world is inhabited.

Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished — perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds — on the distant planet Earth.