Carl Sagan Question Quotes

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question. ~ Carl Sagan

First rule in government spending: Why build one, when you can have two at twice the price? ~ Carl Sagan

In a cosmic perspective, most human concerns seem insignificant, even petty. ~ Carl Sagan

In the littered field of discredited self-congratulatory chauvinisms, there is only one that seems to hold up, one sense in which we are special: Due to our own actions or inactions, and the misuse of our technology, we live at an extraordinary moment, for the Earth at least - the first time that a species has become able to wipe itself out. ~ Carl Sagan

Personally, I would be delighted if there were a life after death, especially if it permitted me to continue to learn about this world and others, if it gave me a chance to discover how history turns out. ~ Carl Sagan

(When asked merely if they accept evolution, 45 percent of Americans say yes. The figure is 70 percent in China.) When the movie Jurassic Park was shown in Israel, it was condemned by some Orthodox rabbis because it accepted evolution and because it taught that dinosaurs lived a hundred million years ago-when, as is plainly stated at every Rosh Hashonhan and every Jewish wedding ceremony, the Universe is less than 6,000 years old. ~ Carl Sagan

I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign. ~ Carl Sagan

The technological perils that science serves up, its implicit challenge to received wisdom, and its perceived difficulty, are all reasons for some people to mistrust and avoid it. ~ Carl Sagan

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. ~ Carl Sagan

Why is the half of humanity with a special sensitivity to the preciousness of life, the half untainted by testosterone poisoning, almost wholly unrepresented in defense establishments and peace negotiations worldwide? [blurb on Daniella Gioseffi's _Women on War_; quoted in Carol Lynn Pearson's _The Ghost of Eternal Polygamy_] ~ Carl Sagan

We are at a crossroads in human history. Never before has there been a moment so simultaneously perilous and promising. We are the first species to have taken evolution into our own hands. ~ Carl Sagan

A new consciousness is developing which sees the earth as a single organism and recognizes that an organism at war with itself is doomed. We are one planet. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time. ~ Carl Sagan

There is another connection between infancy and dreams: both are followed by amnesia. When we emerge from either state, we have great difficulty remembering what we have experienced. In both cases, I would suggest, the left hemisphere of the neocortex, which is responsible for analytic
recollection, has been functioning ineffectively. ~ Carl Sagan

Science is far from a perfect instrument of knowledge. It's just the best we have. In this respect, as in many others, it's like democracy. Science by itself cannot advocate courses of human action, but it can certainly illuminate the possible consequences of alternative courses of action. ~ Carl Sagan

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

Humans - who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals - have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and 'animals' is essential if we are to bend them to our will, make them work for us, wear them, eat them - without any disquieting tinges of guilt or regret. It is unseemly of us, who often behave so unfeelingly toward other animals, to contend that only humans can suffer. The behavior of other animals renders such pretensions specious. They are just too much like us. ~ Carl Sagan

These are the folks who brought us the hydrogen bomb. Forgive me, Lord, for not being more grateful to these kind souls ~ Carl Sagan

Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded. ~ Carl Sagan

The Cosmos is all that is or was or ever will be. Our feeblest contemplations of the Cosmos stir us
there is a tingling in the spine, a catch in the voice, a faint sensation, as if a distant memory, of falling from a height. We know we are approaching the greatest of mysteries. ~ Carl Sagan

We grow up in isolation. Only slowly do we teach ourselves the Cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan

For all I know we may be visited by a different extraterrestrial civilization every second Tuesday, but there's no support for this appealing idea. The extraordinary claims are not supported by extraordinary evidence. ~ Carl Sagan

Coal, oil and gas are called fossil fuels, because they are mostly made of the fossil remains of beings from long ago. The chemical energy within them is a kind of stored sunlight originally accumulated by ancient plants. Our civilization runs by burning the remains of humble creatures who inhabited the Earth hundreds of millions of years before the first humans came on the scene. Like some ghastly cannibal cult, we subsist on the dead bodies of our ancestors and distant relatives. ~ Carl Sagan

Otto Warburg had, half a century before, proposed that oxidation was the cause of many cancers. ~ Carl Sagan

Of course we all would like to foretell the future and make contact with the gods. ~ Carl Sagan

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

We are all flawed and creatures of our times. Is it fair to judge us by the unknown standards of the future? ~ Carl Sagan

You are a collection of almost identical molecules with a different collective label. But is that all? Is there nothing in here but molecules? Some people find this idea somehow demeaning to human dignity. For myself, I find it elevating that our universe permits the evolution of molecular machines as intricate and subtle as we. ~ Carl Sagan

Both scepticism and wonder are skills that need honing and practice. Their harmonious marriage within the mind of every schoolchild ought to be a principal goal of public education. I'd love to see such a domestic felicity portrayed in the media, television especially: a community of people really working the mix - full of wonder, generously open to every notion, dismissing nothing except for good reason, but at the same time, and as second nature, demanding stringent standards of evidence; and these standards applied with at least as much rigour to what they hold dear as to what they are tempted to reject with impunity. ~ Carl Sagan

When I wake up I go through an abbreviated process of mourning all over again. Plainly, there's something within me that's ready to believe in life after death. And it's not the least bit interested in whether there's any sober evidence for it. ~ Carl Sagan

A single message from space will show that it is possible to live through technological adolescence ... It is possible that the future of human civilization depends on the receipt of interstellar messages. ~ Carl Sagan

In the middle 1970s an astronomer I admire put together a modest manifesto called "Objections to Astrology" and asked me to endorse it. I struggled with his wording, and in the end found myself unable to sign, not because I thought astrology has any validity whatever, but because I felt (and still feel) that the tone of the statement was authoritarian. ~ Carl Sagan

Even Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel, and Albert Einstein made serious mistakes. But the scientific enterprise arranges things so that teamwork prevails: What one of us, even the most brilliant among us, misses, another of us, even someone much less celebrated and capable, may detect and rectify. ~ Carl Sagan

The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. ~ Carl Sagan

Nevertheless his prodigious intellectual powers persisted unabated. In 1696, the Swiss mathematician Johann Bernoulli challenged his colleagues to solve an unresolved issue called the brachistochrone problem, specifying the curve connecting two points displaced from each other laterally, along which a body, acted upon only by gravity, would fall in the shortest time. ~ Carl Sagan

When it got to be time to design the week - a period of time, unlike the day, month, and year, with no intrinsic astronomical significance - it was assigned seven days, each named after one of the seven anomalous lights in the night sky. We can readily make out the remnants of this convention. In English, Saturday is Saturn's day. Sunday and Mo[o]nday are clear enough. Tuesday through Friday are named after the gods of the Saxon and kindred Teutonic invaders of Celtic/Roman Britain: Wednesday, for example, is Odin's (or Wodin's) day, which would be more apparent if we pronounced it as it's spelled, "Wedn's Day"; Thursday is Thor's day; Friday is the day of Freya, goddess of love. The last day of the week stayed Roman, the rest of it became German. ~ Carl Sagan