Quotes from Carl Sagan

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?

In science it often happens that scientists say, 'You know that's a really good argument; my position is mistaken,' and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from them again. They really do it. It doesn't happen as often as it should, because scientists are human and change is sometimes painful. But it happens every day. I cannot recall the last time something like that happened in politics or religion.

It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.

The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good.

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.

I can find in my undergraduate classes, bright students who do not know that the stars rise and set at night, or even that the Sun is a star.

Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation

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

In Mozambique, the story goes, monkeys do not talk, because they know if they utter even a single word some man will come and put them to work.

The old appeals to racial, sexual and religious chauvinism to rabid nationalist fervor, are beginning not to work.

I believe that in every person is a kind of circuit which resonates to intellectual discovery-and the idea is to make that resonance work