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Carl Sagan

Carl Sagan Quotes

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Famous Carl Sagan Quotes

“We've begun at last to wonder about our origins, star stuff contemplating the stars, organized collections of ten billion billion billion atoms contemplating the evolution of matter, tracing that long path by which it arrived at consciousness here on the planet Earth and perhaps throughout the cosmos. Our obligation to survive and flourish is owed not just to ourselves but also to that cosmos, ancient and vast, from which we spring.”

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Author:Carl Sagan
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“Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

HelpingDarkPlanetsLonelyCosmosCosmicElsewherePaleOur PlanetHintsObscurityPlanet EarthVastnessSpecksPale Blue DotAcross The UniverseAstronomy And UniverseBlue PlanetOur Planet EarthVastness Of Space
Book:Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
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“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.”

HumansWarAgeEarthScienceSpaceConsciousnessPlanetsOceanLonelySpeciesVulnerableDevelopingRevelationsExplorationOrganismsDoomedFiniteTime And SpaceSpace ExplorationHuman Species
Author:Carl Sagan
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“The significance of our lives and our fragile planet is then determined only by our own wisdom and courage. We are the custodians of life's meaning. We long for a Parent to care for us, to forgive us our errors, to save us from our childish mistakes. But knowledge is preferable to ignorance. Better by far to embrace the hard truth than a reassuring fable. If we crave some cosmic purpose, then let us find ourselves a worthy goal.”

IfsLongHardCarePurposeParentGoalMistakeOur LivesIgnorancePlanetsEmbraceForgivingErrorsWorthyDeterminedSignificanceFragileCosmicCraveFablesReassuringHard TruthsCustodiansPale Blue Dot
Book:Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space
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“National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.”

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Author:Carl Sagan
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“For all our conceits about being the center of the universe, we live in a routine planet of a humdrum star stuck away in an obscure corner ... on an unexceptional galaxy which is one of about 100 billion galaxies. ... That is the fundamental fact of the universe we inhabit, and it is very good for us to understand that.”

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Author:Carl Sagan
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“Anything else you're interested in is not going to happen if you can't breathe the air and drink the water. Don't sit this one out. Do something. You are by accident of fate alive at an absolutely critical moment in the history of our planet.”

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Author:Carl Sagan
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“We can make a similar examination, but with greater uncertainty, of the extraterrestrial hypothesis that holds that a wide range of UFOs viewed on the planet Earth are space vehicles from planets of other stars.”

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Book:Carl Sagan's Cosmic Connection: An Extraterrestrial Perspective
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“Human history can be viewed as a slowly dawning awareness that we are members of a larger group Groups of people from divergent ethnic and cultural backgrounds working in some sense together [is] surely a humanizing and character building experience. If we are to survive, our loyalties must be broadened further, to include the whole human community, the entire planet Earth.”

PeopleIfsHumansWholeCharacterEarthTogetherCommunityGroupsAwarenessBuildingPlanetsMembersLoyaltyBackgroundsCosmosHuman HistoryCharacter BuildingPlanet EarthDivergentPale Blue Dot
Book:Cosmos
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“We seem, these days, much more willing to recognize the perils before us than we were even a decade ago. The newly recognized dangers threaten all of us, equally. No one can say how it will turn out down here. But this is also, we may note, the first time that a species has become able to journey to the planets and the stars. Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense a stirring of the breeze.”

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Author:Carl Sagan
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“Centuries hence, when current social and political problems may seem as remote as the problems of the Thirty Years' War are to us, our age may be remembered chiefly for one fact: It was the time when the inhabitants of the earth first made contact with the vast cosmos in which their small planet is embedded.”

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Author:Carl Sagan
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“The library connects us with the insight and knowledge, painfully extracted from Nature, of the greatest minds that ever were, with the best teachers, drawn from the entire planet and from all our history, to instruct us without tiring, and to inspire us to make our own contribution to the collective knowledge of the human species.”

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Book:Cosmos
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“What a splendid perspective contact with a profoundly different civilization might provide! In a cosmic setting vast and old beyond ordinary human understanding we are a little lonely, and we ponder the ultimate significance, if any, of our tiny but exquisite blue planet, the Earth.... In the deepest sense the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is a search for ourselves.”

IfsHumansLittlesDifferentMightEarthUniverseUnderstandingPlanetsPerspectiveCivilizationOrdinaryLonelyUltimateBlueTinySettingContactSettingsSignificanceCosmicSplendidExquisitePonderingExtraterrestrialBlue Planet
Author:Carl Sagan
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