Carl Sagan Quotes

“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.”

“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.”

“It is the responsibility of scientists never to suppress knowledge, no matter how awkward that knowledge is, no matter how it may bother those in power.

We are not smart enough to decide which pieces of knowledge are permissible and which are not.”

“It pays to keep an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out.”

“My fundamental premise about the brain is that its workings – what we sometimes call 'mind' — are a consequence of its anatomy and physiology, and nothing more.”

“One glance at a book and you hear the voice of another person, perhaps someone dead for 1,000 years. To read is to voyage through time.”

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

“Two billion years ago, our ancestors were microbes; a half-billion years ago,fish; a hundred million years ago, proto-humans puzzling
out the taming of fire. Our evolutionary lineage is marked by mastery of change. In our time, the pace is quickening.”

“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.”