Carl Sagan

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.

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 you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.

Science is not only compatible with spirituality; it is a profound source of spirituality.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together.

In order to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us.

Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever it has to teach us, or the person who has a fixed idea about how the world should be?

The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent to the concerns of such puny, brief specks of time and space as we.

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

Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it, we go nowhere.

A celibate clergy is an especially good idea, because it tends to suppress any inclination in priestly vestries toward reproducing the faithful and fourth rate.

The universe is a pretty big place. If it's just us, seems like an awful waste of space.

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

Our species needs, and deserves, a citizenry with minds wide awake and a basic understanding of how the world works.

I am often amazed at how what others see as tragedy can, in my view, so easily be turned into a smile.

The cost of a single full-scale nuclear war could buy every starving person on Earth enough food to last for 200 years.

Anything you can turn into a spaceship, it's a good idea to be able to turn into a gun as well.