"Our television signals leave this planet and go out into space...the signals spread out from the earth in spherical waves, a little like ripples in a ...
Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.
~ Carl Sagan ~
Photo by Ákos Szabó
Photo by Ian Turnell
Sailors on a becalmed sea, we sense the stirring of a breeze.
More Carl Sagan quotes
"Everything not forbidden by the laws of nature, he assured her - quoting a colleague down the hall - is mandatory.
"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 d...
"Let's see if I got this right," she would say to herself. "I've taken an inert gas that's in the air, made it into a liquid, put some impurities in a ...
"The total amount of energy from outside the solar system ever received by all the radio telescopes on the planet Earth is less than the energy of a si...
"National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to...
"Something very strange is going on in the depths of space.
"The laws of nature cannot be randomly reshuffled at the cusps [of an oscillating universe]. If the universe has already gone through many oscillations...
"We will know which stars to visit. Our descendants will then skim the light years, the children of Thales and Aristarchus, Leonardo and Einstein.
"In the vastness of space and the immensity of time, it is my joy to share a planet and an epoch with Annie.[Dedication to Sagan's wife, Ann Druyan, in...
"By looking far out into space we are also looking far back into time, back toward the horizon of the universe, back toward the epoch of the Big Bang.
"We tend to hear much more about the splendors returned than the ships that brought them or the shipwrights. It has always been that way. Even those hi...
"Before we invented civilization our ancestors lived mainly in the open out under the sky. Before we devised artificial lights and atmospheric pollutio...
"The Cosmos extends, for all practical purposes, forever. After a brief sedentary hiatus, we are resuming our ancient nomadic way of life. Our remote d...
"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...