Top 12 Carl Sagan Quotes
Mind-expanding nuggets from one of the greatest science popularizers of all time
This is the latest in my Top 12 Quotes series. Check out the full collection here.
Carl Sagan (1934-1996) was one of the greatest science popularizers in the history of science. His academic specialty was astronomy, and that was the main topic he popularized. But he had a fantastic knack of linking astronomy to life here on Earth, and he also went far beyond astronomy in his popular-science writing and TV shows.
In this post, I’ll attempt the impossible: I’ll try to whittle down Sagan’s prodigious output to 12 essential quotes. As you’ll see, Sagan had a unique way of looking at the world, and a knack for turning our everyday views of the world upside down and inside out. If you like what you read here, I’d definitely recommend delving more deeply into his work.
“The size and age of the cosmos are beyond ordinary human understanding. Lost somewhere between immensity and eternity is our tiny planetary home, the Earth. For the first time we have the power to determine the fate of our planet, and ourselves.”
[SSW: The next two quotes were inspired by the photograph below, which was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe when it was 6 billion kilometers from Earth.] “Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives… 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 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 this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.”
“The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”
“If there’s nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?”
“We are the local embodiment of a Cosmos grown to self-awareness. We have begun to contemplate our origins: starstuff pondering the stars; organized assemblages of ten billion billion billion atoms considering the evolution of atoms; tracing the long journey by which, here at least, consciousness arose.”
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented brains. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library.”
“What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.”
“In its encounter with Nature, science invariably elicits a sense of reverence and awe. The very act of understanding is a celebration of joining, merging, even if on a very modest scale, with the magnificence of the Cosmos. And the cumulative worldwide build-up of knowledge over time converts science into something only a little short of a trans-national, trans-generational meta-mind.”
“Each of us is a tiny being, permitted to ride on the outermost skin of one of the smaller planets for a few dozen trips around the local star… The longest-lived organisms on Earth endure for about a millionth of the age of our planet. A bacterium lives for one hundred-trillionth of that time. So of course the individual organisms see nothing of the overall pattern - continents, climate, evolution. They barely set foot on the world stage and are promptly snuffed out - yesterday a drop of semen, as the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius wrote, tomorrow a handful of ashes. If the Earth were as old as a person, a typical organism would be born, live, and die in a sliver of a second. We are fleeting, transitional creatures, snowflakes fallen on the hearth fire. That we understand even a little of our origins is one of the great triumphs of human insight and courage.”
“The proponents of such borderline beliefs, when criticized, often point to geniuses of the past who were ridiculed. But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.”
“Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” (This is known as Sagan’s Standard, and it’s an essential tool for thinking.)
Bonus Sagan Content: In the following clip from the TV series Cosmos, Sagan explains how the Ancient Greeks, using reason and math, figured out that the Earth isn’t flat, more than 2,000 years ago.
Hope you enjoyed this quotes collection!
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Carl is one of my heroes. He inspired me to pursue a career in science. I miss him dearly. Thank you for posting this tribute.
Hmmm maybe time to reread "Demon Haunted World"