Every one of us is, in the cosmic perspective, precious. If a human disagrees with you, let him live. In a hundred billion galaxies, you will not find another.

For thousands of years humans were oppressed— as some of us still are— by the notion that the universe is a marionette whose strings are pulled by a god or gods, unseen and inscrutable. Then,...

Humans — who enslave, castrate, experiment on, and fillet other animals — have had an understandable penchant for pretending animals do not feel pain. A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we...

If we long for our planet to be important, there is something we can do about it. We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

It’s a lazy Saturday afternoon, there’s a couple lying naked in bed reading Encyclopediea Brittannica to each other, and arguing about whether the Andromeda Galaxy is more ‘numinous’ than the Ressurection. Do they know how...

In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found that makes the emptiness bearable is each other.

Since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring–not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason...

We make our purpose.

Look again at that dot. 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...

I’m frequently asked, “Do you believe there’s extraterrestrial intelligence?” I give the standard arguments- there are a lot of places out there, the molecules of life are everywhere, I use the word billions, and so...

Religions are often state-protected nurseries of pseudoscience, although there’s no reason why religions have to play that role. In a way, it’s an artefact from times long gone.

Might it be possible at some future time, when neurophysiology has advanced substantially, to reconstruct the memories or insight of someone long dead?…It would be the ultimate breach of privacy.

The laws of nature cannot be randomly reshuffled at the cusps [of an oscillating universe]. If the universe has already gone through many oscillations, many possible laws of gravity would have been so weak that,...

The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these...

Across the sea of space, the stars are other suns.

For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring.

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.

There is something stunningly narrow about how the Anthropic Principle is phrased. Yes, only certain laws and constants of nature are consistent with our kind of life. But essentially the same laws and constants are...

But the male lexicographers had somehow neglected to coin a word for the dislike of men. They were almost entirely men themselves, she thought, and had been unable to imagine a market for such a...

Science cuts two ways, of course; its products can be used for both good and evil. But there’s no turning back from science. The early warnings about technological dangers also come from science.

To live in the hearts we leave behind is to live forever.

Another glorious feature of many modern science museums is a movie theater showing IMAX or OMNIMAX films. In some cases the screen is ten stories tall and wraps around you. The Smithsonian’s National Air &...

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.

You squeeze the eyedropper, and a drop of pond water drips out onto the microscope stage. You look at the projected image. The drop is full of life – strange beings swimming, crawling, tumbling; high...

Una científica compañera mía me contaba un reciente viaje que realizó a la meseta de Nueva Guinea, donde visitó una tribu todavía en la edad de piedra que apenas había tenido contactos con la civilización....

Understanding is a kind of ecstasy

When we look up at night and view the stars, everything we see is shinning because of distant nuclear fusion.

These days there seems to be nowhere left to explore, at least on the land area of the Earth. Victims of their very success, the explorers now pretty much stay home.

It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.

The symbolism seemed so apt. The same technology that can propel apocalyptic weapons from continent to continent would enable the first human voyage to another planet. It was a choice of fitting mythic power: to...

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it...

deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the skeptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be....

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.

At the very moment that humans discovered the scale of the universe and found that their most unconstrained fancies were in fact dwarfed by the true dimensions of even the Milky Way Galaxy, they took...

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...

Those at too great a distance may, I am well are, mistake ignorance for perspective.

Do you not see that woman over there with her six-month-old child? Her husband has been on an extended voyage to another island for two years.” Is it more likely that the Melanesians were ignorant...

All her life, dreams had been her friends. Her dreams were unusually detailed, well-structured, colorful.

The American and Russian capabilities in space science and technology mesh; they interdigitate. Each is strong where the other is weak. This is a marriage made in heaven – but one that has been surprisingly...

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm,...

And you are made of a hundred trillion cells. We are, each of us, a multitude.

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it’s different. Consider again that dot. That’s here, that’s home, that’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you...

In science it often happens that scientists say, ‘You know that’s a really good argument; my position is mistaken,’ and then they would actually change their minds and you never hear that old view from...

The old exhortations to nationalist fervor and jingoist pride have begun to lose their appeal. Perhaps because of rising standards of living, children are being treated better worldwide. In only a few decades, sweeping global...

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives infusion from the will and affections; whence proceeds sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he...

Meanwhile the Cosmos is rich beyond measure: the total number of stars in the universe is greater than all the grains of sand on all the beaches of the planet Earth.

There is every reason to think that in the coming years Mars and its mysteries will become increasingly familiar to the inhabitants of the Planet Earth.

Or consider a story in the Jewish Talmud left out of the Book of Genesis. (It is in doubtful accord with the account of the apple, the Tree of Knowledge, the Fall, and the expulsion...

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.

[When a religious couple wrote to Sagan about fulfilled prophecies, he wrote back in May 1996:]If ‘fulfilled prophecy’ is your criterion, why do you not believe in materialistic science, which has an unparalleled record of...