Carl Sagan Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Carl Sagan Quotes. The wide variety of quotes available makes it possible to find a quote to suit your needs. You’ve likely heard some of the Carl Sagan Quotes before, but that’s because they truly are great.

I am often amazed at how much more capability and enthusiasm for science there is among elementary school youngsters than among college students.

Carl Sagan

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena.

Carl Sagan

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

Carl Sagan

We’re in very bad trouble if we don’t understand the planet we’re trying to save.

Carl Sagan

Even these stars, which seem so numerous, are as sand, as dust – or less than dust – in the enormity of the space in which there is nothing.

Carl Sagan

The universe is not required to be in perfect harmony with human ambition.

Carl Sagan

In our obscurity – in all this vastness – there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us.

Carl Sagan

The professed function of the nuclear weapons on each side is to prevent the other side from using their nuclear weapons. If that’s all it is, then we’ve gotta as: how many nuclear weapons do you need to do that?

Carl Sagan

There is a wide, yawning black infinity. In every direction, the extension is endless; the sensation of depth is overwhelming. And the darkness is immortal. Where light exists, it is pure, blazing, fierce; but light exists almost nowhere, and the blackness itself is also pure and blazing and fierce.

Carl Sagan

We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster. We might get away with it for a while, but sooner or later this combustible mixture of ignorance and power is going to blow up in our faces.

Carl Sagan

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.

Carl Sagan

I’ve written a number of books that have to do with the evolution of humans, human intelligence, human emotions.

Carl Sagan

Who are we? We find that we live on an insignificant planet of a humdrum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are far more galaxies than people.

Carl Sagan

But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Carl Sagan

The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.

Carl Sagan

It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling and, I might add, a character-building experience.

Carl Sagan

We’ve arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology.

Carl Sagan

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.

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

Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Carl Sagan

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

Carl Sagan

You probably don’t need more weapons than what’s required to destroy every city on earth. There’s only 2,300 cities. So, the United States, by that criteria, only needs 2,300 nuclear weapons – well, we’ve got more than 25,000!

Carl Sagan

It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

Carl Sagan

We are the representatives of the cosmos; we are an example of what hydrogen atoms can do, given 15 billion years of cosmic evolution.

Carl Sagan

We live in a society exquisitely dependent on science and technology, in which hardly anyone knows anything about science and technology.

Carl Sagan