15 Out-Of-This-World Carl Sagan Quotes About The Cosmos, Love, and Earth!
American astronomer, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, and science communicator Carl Sagan is one of the most unforgettable figures who popularized science to a vast number of people by making it more interesting than ever. He was known for being the author of the TV series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage produced in the 1980s, which was described by David Itzkoff of The New York Times as 'a watershed moment for science-themed television programming.'
And here we are with 15 of his most memorable quotes to remind you that science is the savior you’ve been looking for!
1. "It is sometimes said that scientists are unromantic, that their passion to figure out robs the world of beauty and mystery… It does no harm to the romance of the sunset to know a little bit about it."
2. "Science is much more than a body of knowledge. It is a way of thinking. This is central to its success. Science invites us to let the facts in, even when they don’t conform to our preconceptions."
3. "We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."
4. "Not explaining science seems to me perverse. When you're in love, you want to tell the world."
5. "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere."
6. "For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."
7. "I don't want to believe. I want to know."
8. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
9. "Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence."
10. "If we can't think for ourselves, if we're unwilling to question authority, then we're just putty in the hands of those in power."
11. "How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder? If chimpanzees have consciousness, do they not have what until now has been described as 'human rights'?"
12. "Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another."
13. "We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself."
14. "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe."
15. Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of planet Earth taken on February 14, 1990, by the Voyager 1 space probe from a record distance of about 3 billion miles.
During a public lecture at Cornell University in 1994, Carl Sagan presented the image to the audience and shared his reflections on the deeper meaning behind the idea of the Pale Blue Dot:
We succeeded in taking that picture, and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there – on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. 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.
[...] To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, THE ONLY HOME WE'VE EVER KNOWN.
Source: Wikipedia
BONUS from Neil deGrasse Tyson: “Knowing how to think empowers you far beyond those who know only what to think.”
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