Quotes from Carl Sagan

I would rather be a transformed ape than a degenerate son of Adam.

Apart from a thin film of life at the very surface of the Earth, an occasional intrepid spacecraft, and some radio static, our impact on the Universe is nil. It knows nothing of us.

I'm told that Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson" (at least in the Arthur Conan Doyle books) Jimmy Cagney never said, "You dirty rat"; and Humphrey Bogart never said, "Play it again, Sam." But they might as well have, because these apocrypha have firmly insinuated themselves into popular culture.

The evidence, so far at least and laws of Nature aside, does not require a Designer. Maybe there is one hiding, maddeningly unwilling to be revealed. Sometimes it seems a very slender hope.

The Greek religion explained that diffuse band of light in the night sky as the milk of Hera, squirted from her breast across the heavens, a legend that is the origin of the phrase Westerners still use—the Milky Way.

I remind myself that madmen really exist. Sometimes they achieve the highest levels of political power in modern industrial nations.

The tragedy of the human species is it has evolved the capacity of foresight, but refuses to use it.

The secrets of evolution are death and time—the deaths of enormous numbers of lifeforms that were imperfectly adapted to the environment; and time for a long succession of small mutations.

Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable. I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God.

We also know how cruel the truth often is, and we wonder whether delusion is not more consoling. HENRI POINCARÉ (1854—1912)

We are privileged to live in, and if we are lucky to influence, one of the most critical epochs in the history of the human species.

Newton was born on Christmas Day, 1642, so tiny that, as his mother told him years later, he would have fit into a quart mug. Sickly, feeling abandoned by his parents, quarrelsome, unsociable, a virgin to the day he died, Isaac Newton was perhaps the greatest scientific genius who ever lived.