F. Sagan Quotations

For most of human history we have searched for our place in the cosmos. Who are we? What are we? We find that we inhabit an insignificant planet of a hum-drum star lost in a galaxy tucked away in some forgotten corner of a universe in which there are

We've been told that there exists no other trove of rock-and-roll history that is anywhere near the size of this anywhere else.

I thought there was maybe a half million to a million slides and negatives. As it turned out, there's probably is closer to a million and a half to two million slides and negatives.

Who are we? Where do we come from? Why are we this way and not some other? What does it mean to be human? Are we capable, if need be, of fundamental change, or do the dead hands of forgotten ancestors impel us in some direction, indiscriminately for good or ill, and beyond our control? Can we alter our character? Can we improve our societies? Can we leave our children a world better than the one that was left to us? Can we free them from the demons that torment us and haunt our civilization? In the long run, are we wise enough to know what changes to make? Can we be trusted with our own future?

We have swept through all of the planets in the solar system, from Mercury to Neptune, in a historic 20 (to) 30 year age of spacecraft discovery,

We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation.

We are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think its forever.

Bill Graham was a pack rat. I think Bill Graham just put everything down in that storage area and was going to keep it forever.

The significance of a finding that there are other beings who share this universe with us would be absolutely phenomenal, it would be an epochal event in human history,

A dress makes no sense unless it inspires men to want to take it off you.

No woman wants a dress that another has tossed off, but in men they aren't so choosy.

Are we an exceptionally unlikely accident or is the universe brimming over with intelligence? (It's) a vital question for understanding ourselves and our history,

At seventeen, you tend to go in for unhappy love affairs.

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. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, 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.

It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the ''fronts'' people assume before one another's eyes, and the ''front'' a writer puts on the face of reality.

It's tough to do your job because it's so tempting to go down and just listen to audio or go look at video. I could spend all day doing it every day.

It was 25 feet high in height, below ground. Part of it was below ground. And there were, I thought, hundreds of thousands of items that were in there. And truly there were millions of items.

They laughed at Galileo. They laughed at Newton. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown.

Skeptical scrutiny is the means, in both science and religion, by which deep insights can be winnowed from deep nonsense

I like men to behave like men - strong and childish

In my opinion it's worth a significant amount more. It certainly is in excess of $50 million. It's probably in excess of $100 million.

In the audio and video archives, there are 7,000 taped concerts alone. I'm a rock fan who wanted to get into the music business and own intellectual property.

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

For the first time, we have the power to decide the fate of our planet and ourselves, ... This is a time of great danger, but our species is young, and curious, and brave. It shows much promise.