Carl Sagan

"We are star stuff harvesting sunlight."

"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."

"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."

"For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love."

"You can get into a habit of thought in which you enjoy making fun of all those other people who don't see things as clearly as you do. We have to guard carefully against it."

"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. One of the great revelations of the age of space exploration is the image of the earth finite and lonely, somehow vulnerable, bearing the entire human species through the oceans of space and time."

"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?"

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

"We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend on science and technology. We have also arranged things so that almost no one understands science and technology. This is a prescription for disaster."

"A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any hereditary propensity toward fanaticism."

"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."

"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."

"The idea that God is an oversized white male with a flowing beard, who sits in the sky and tallies the fall of every sparrow is ludicrous. But if by 'God,' one means the set of physical laws that govern the universe, then clearly there is such a God. This God is emotionally unsatisfying... it does not make much sense to pray to the law of gravity."

"I don't want to believe. I want to know."

"The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five."

"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

"We can't help it. Life looks for life."

"The world is so exquisite with so much love and moral depth, that there is no reason to deceive ourselves with pretty stories for which there's little good evidence. Far better it seems to me, in our vulnerability, is to look death in the eye and to be grateful every day for the brief but magnificent opportunity that life provides."

"We are all star stuff."

"Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge."