“[...] I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understandi...” — Carl Sagan Quote

“[...] I try not to think with my gut. If I'm serious about understanding the world, thinking with anything besides my brain, as tempting as that might be, is likely to get me into trouble. Really, it's okay to reserve judgement until the evidence is in.”

“We all have a thirst for wonder. It's a deeply human quality. Science and religion are both bound up with it. What I'm saying is, you don't have to make stories up, you don't have to exaggerate. There's wonder and awe enough in the real world. Nature's a lot better at inventing wonders than we are.”

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.”

“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 steps that ensured that their descendants would be unable to see the stars at all. For a million years humans had grown up with a personal daily knowledge of the vault of heaven. In the last few thousand years they began building and emigrating to the cities. In the last few decades, a major fraction of the human population has abandoned a rustic way of life. As technology developed and the cities were polluted, the nights became starless. New generations grew to maturity wholly ignorant of the sky that had transfixed their ancestors and that had stimulated the modern age of science and technology. Without even noticing, just as astronomy entered a golden age most people cut themselves off from the sky, a cosmic isolationism that ended only with the dawn of space exploration.”

“Just because an apple falls one hundred times out of a hundred does not mean it will fall on the hundred and first.”

“Gravity explains the motions of the planets, but it cannot explain who sets the planets in motion.”

“Science is simply common sense at its best, that is, rigidly accurate in observation, and merciless to fallacy in logic.”

“Knowledge is like an endless resource; a well of water that satisfies the innate thirst of the growing human soul. Therefore never stop learning... because the day you do, you will also stop maturing.”

“A mathematician is an individual who calls himself a 'physicist' and does 'physics' and physical experiments with abstract concepts.”

“The moral issue here is whether the United States Congress is going to stand in the way of science and preclude scientists from doing lifesaving research.”