Becky > Becky's Quotes

“Frederick Douglass taught that literacy is the path from slavery to freedom. There are many kinds of slavery and many kinds of freedom, but reading is still the path.”
― Carl Sagan

“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.”
― Carl Sagan

“The truth may be puzzling. It may take some work to grapple with. It may be counterintuitive. It may contradict deeply held prejudices. It may not be consonant with what we desperately want to be true. But our preferences do not determine what's true.”
― Carl Sagan

“I consider it an extremely dangerous doctrine, because the more likely we are to assume that the solution comes from the outside, the less likely we are to solve our problems ourselves.”
― Carl Sagan

“we make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depth of our answers”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent.”
― Carl Sagan

“The illegality of cannabis is outrageous, an impediment to full utilization of a drug which helps produce the serenity and insight, sensitivity and fellowship so desperately needed in this increasingly mad and dangerous world.”
― Carl Sagan

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”
― Carl Sagan

“The cure for a fallacious argument is a better argument, not the suppression of ideas.”
― Carl Sagan

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth.”
― Carl Sagan

“But I could be wrong.”
― Carl Sagan

“If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“People are not stupid. They believe things for reasons. The last way for skeptics to get the attention of bright, curious, intelligent people is to belittle or condescend or to show arrogance toward their beliefs.”
― Carl Sagan

“You have to know the past to understand the present.”
― Carl Sagan

“The Hindu religion is the only one of the world’s great faiths dedicated to the idea that the Cosmos itself undergoes an immense, indeed an infinite, number of deaths and rebirths.
It is the only religion in which the time scales correspond to those of modern scientific cosmology. Its cycles run from our ordinary day and night to a day and night of Brahma, 8.64 billion years long. Longer than the age of the Earth or the Sun and about half the time since the Big Bang.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“But nature is always more subtle, more intricate, more elegant than what we are able to imagine.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Understanding is a kind of ecstasy”
― Carl Sagan, Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science

“Your religion assumes that people are children and need a boogeyman so they'll behave. You want people to believe in God so they'll obey the law. That's the only means that occurs to you: a strict secular police force, and the threat of punishment by an all-seeing God for whatever the police overlook. You sell human beings short.”
― Carl Sagan, Contact

“We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster”
― Carl Sagan

“Books are like seeds. They can lie dormant for centuries and then flower in the most unpromising soil.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“There are no forbidden questions in science, no matters too sensitive or delicate to be probed, no sacred truths.”
― Carl Sagan

“There are wonders enough out there without our inventing any.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.”
― Carl Sagan, Cosmos

“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, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“The visions we offer our children shape the future. ”
― Carl Sagan

“One of the reasons for its success is that science has a built-in, error-correcting machinery at its very heart. Some may consider this an overbroad characterization, but to me every time we exercise self-criticism, every time we test our ideas against the outside world, we are doing science. When we are self-indulgent and uncritical, when we confuse hopes and facts, we slide into pseudoscience and superstition.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark