The Varieties of Scientific Experience Quotes

“Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“We make our purpose.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“I would suggest that science is, at least in my part, informed worship.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“If we are merely matter intricately assembled, is this really demeaning? If there's nothing here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“I think the discomfort that some people feel in going to the monkey cages at the zoo is a warning sign.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Science is only a Latin word for knowledge”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that's their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“So those who wished for some central cosmic purpose for us, or at least our world, or at least our solar system, or at least our galaxy, have been disappointed, progressively disappointed. The universe is not responsive to our ambitious expectations.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“I think if we ever reach the point where we think we thoroughly understand who we are and where we came from, we will have failed.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“It goes with a courageous intent to greet the universe as it really is, not to foist our emotional predispositions on it but to courageously accept what our explorations tell us.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“We batter this planet as if we had someplace else to go.”
― Ann Druyan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“No single step in the persuit of enlightenment should ever be considered sacred; only the search was.”
― Ann Druyan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience

“almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Certainly on this planet it is not apparent that there are beings more intelligent than humans, although a case can be made for dolphins and whales, and in fact if humans succeed in destroying themselves with nuclear weapons, a case can be made that ALL other animals are smarter than humans.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. There are not many different kinds; there's only one kind. It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“A new concept of god: “something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is, gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled god. And by that all they meant was that here were a set of exquisitely powerful physical principles that seemed to explain a great deal that was otherwise inexplicable about the universe. Laws of nature…that apply not just locally, not just in Glasgow, but far beyond: Edinburgh, Moscow…Mars…the center of the Milky Way, and out by the most distant quarters known. That the same laws of physics apply everywhere is quite remarkable. Certainly that represents a power greater than any of us.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Does trying to understand the universe at all betray a lack of humility ? I believe it is true that humility is the only just response in a confrontation with the universe, but not a humility that prevents us from seeking the nature of the universe we are admiring. If we seek that nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance and self-deception. If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It or whatever the appropriate pronoun is, prefer a kind of sodden blockhead who worships while understanding nothing ? Or would He prefer His votaries to admire the real universe in all its intricacy ? I would suggest that science is, at least in part, informed worship. My deeply held belief is that if a god of anything like the traditional sort exists, then our curiosity and intelligence are provided by such a god. We would be unappreciative of those gifts if we suppressed our passion to explore the universe and ourselves. On the other hand, if such a traditional god does not exist, then our curiosity and our intelligence are the essential tools for managing our survival in an extremely dangerous time. In either case the enterprise of knowledge is consistent surely with science; it should be with religion, and it is essential for the welfare of the human species.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“we have a theology that is Earth-centered and involves a tiny piece of space, and when we step back, when we attain a broader cosmic perspective, some of it seems very small in scale. And in fact a general problem with much of Western theology in my view is that the God portrayed is too small. It is a god of a tiny world and not a god of a galaxy, much less of a universe.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“As science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do. It's a big universe, of course, so He, She, or It, could be profitably employed in many places. But what has clearly been happening is that evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God. And then after a while, we explain it, and so that's no longer God's realm.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Many religions have attempted to make statues of their gods very large, and the idea, I suppose, is to make us feel small. But if that’s their purpose, they can keep their paltry icons. We need only look up if we wish to feel small.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience

“If we are to discuss the idea of God and be restricted to rational arguments, then it is probably useful to know what we are talking about when we say “God.” This turns out not to be easy. The Romans called the Christians atheists. Why? Well, the Christians had a god of sorts, but it wasn’t a real god. They didn’t believe in the divinity of apotheosized emperors or Olympian gods. They had a peculiar, different kind of god. So it was very easy to call people who believed in a different kind of god atheists. And that general sense that an atheist is anybody who doesn’t believe exactly as I do prevails in our own time.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Now, it would be wholly foolish to deny the existence of laws of nature. And if that is what we are talking about when we say God, then no one can possibly be an atheist, or at least anyone who would profess atheism would have to give a coherent argument about why the laws of nature are inapplicable. I think he or she would be hard-pressed. So with this latter definition of God, we all believe in God.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Our history is in part a battle to the death of inadequate myths. If I can't convince you, I must kill you. That will change your mind. You are a threat to my version of the truth, especially the truth about who I am and what my nature is. The thought that I may have dedicated my life to a lie, that I might have accepted a conventional wisdom that no longer, if it ever did, corresponds to the external reality, that is a very painful realization. I will tend to resist it to the last. I will go to almost any lengths to prevent myself from seeing that the worldview that I have dedicated my life to is inadequate.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“If there is as a continuum from self-reproducing molecules, such as DNA, to microbes, and an evolutionary sequence continuum from microbes to humans, why should we imagine that continuum to stop at humans?”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“The number of external galaxies beyond the Milky Way is at least in the thousands of millions and perhaps in the hundreds of thousands of millions, each of which contains a number of stars more or less comparable to that in our own galaxy. So if you multiply out how many stars that means, it is some number—let’s see, ten to the…It’s something like one followed by twenty-three zeros, of which our Sun is but one. It is a useful calibration of our place in the universe. And this vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe, in my view has been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“There are a vast number of stars within our galaxy. The number is not so large as the number of cometary nuclei around the Sun but is nevertheless hardly modest. It's about 400 billion stars, of which the Sun is one.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Or look at the status of women, about which finally the planet is coming to its senses in our own time. Or even things like smallpox and other disfiguring and fatal diseases, diseases of children, that were once thought to be an inevitable, God-given part of life. The clergy argued, and some still do, that those diseases were sent by God as a scourge for mankind. Now there are no more cases of smallpox on the planet. For a few tens of millions of dollars and the efforts of physicians from a hundred countries, coordinated by the World Health Organization, smallpox has been removed from the planet Earth.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“And therefore I would say that the first thing to do is to realize that governments, all governments, at least on occasion, lie. And some of them do it all the time - some of them do it only every second statement - but, by and large, governments distort the facts in order to remain in office.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“Instead of this, what we need is a honing of the skills of explication, of dialogue, of what used to be called logic and rhetoric and what used to be essential to every college education, a honing of the skills of compassion, which, just like intellectual abilities, need practice to be perfected. If we are to understand another's belief, then we must also understand the deficiencies and inadequacies of our own. And those deficiencies and inadequacies are very major. This is true whichever political or ideological or ethnic or cultural tradition we come from. In a complex universe, in a society undergoing unprecedented change, how can we find the truth if we are not willing to question everything and to give a fair hearing to everything? There is a worldwide close-mindedness that imperils the species. It was always with us, but the risks weren't as grave, because weapons of mass destruction were not then available.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God

“We are spending a million million dollars every year, worldwide, on armaments. A million million dollars. Think of what you could do with a million million dollars. A visitor from somewhere else - the legendary intelligent extraterrestrial - dipping down to the Earth and inquiring what we are about and finding such prodigies of human inventiveness and such enormous fractions of our wealth devoted not just to the means of war but to the means of massive global destruction - such a being would surely deduce that our prospects are not very good and perhaps go on to some other, more promising world.”
― Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God