Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan
Carl Edward Saganwas an American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, science popularizer, and science communicator in astronomy and other natural sciences. He is best known for his contributions to the scientific research of extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space: the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth9 November 1934
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
The brain is like a muscle. When it is in use we feel very good. Understanding is joyous.
It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.
Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollution and modern forms of nocturnal entertainment we watched the stars. There were practical calendar reasons of course but there was more to it than that. Even today the most jaded city dweller can be unexpectedly moved upon encountering a clear night sky studded with thousands of twinkling stars. When it happens to me after all these years it still takes my breath away.
Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
The dumbing down of America is evident in the slow decay of substantive content, a kind of celebration of ignorance.
Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere.
I don't want to believe. I want to know.
Other things being equal, it is better to be smart than to be stupid.
A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism.
In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.
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?