Carl Sagan

"Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was true, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other's eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever."

"I sit surrounded by cartons of mail from people all over the planet who mourn Carl's loss. Many of them credit him with their awakenings. Some of them say that Carl's example has inspired them to work for science and reason against the forces of superstition and fundamentalism. These thoughts comfort me and lift me up out of my heartache. They allow me to feel, without resorting to the supernatural, that Carl lives."

"Superstition is marked not by its pretension to a body of knowledge but by its method of seeking truth."

"I stress that the universe is made mostly of nothing, that something is the exception."

"This vast number of worlds, the enormous scale of the universe... has not been taken into account, even superficially, in virtually no religion, and especially in no Western religions."

"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."

"In many myths, the one possibility the gods are most anxious about is that humans will discover some secret of immortality or even... attempt to stride the high heavens. ...It's a little bit like the rich imposing poverty on the poor and then asking to be loved because of it."

"A general problem with much of Western theology... 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 a universe."

"If we seek... nature, then love can be informed by truth instead of being based on ignorance or self-deception."

"If a Creator God exists, would He or She or It... 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 intracacy?"

"Science is, at least in part, informed worship."

"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."

"The idea that as I walk in this direction my watch goes slightly slower and I am contracted in the direction of motion and my mass has increased slightly does not correspond to everyday experience. ...the reason that it does not correspond to common sense is that we are not in the habit of traveling close to the speed of light. We may one day be in that habit, and then the Lorentz transformations will be natural, intuitive."

"If I were to propose to you that my arm could be in this position or in that position but it would be forbidden by the laws of nature to be in some intermediate position, that would likely strike you as absurd, as contrary to experience. And yet on the subatomic level, there is a quantization of energy and position and momentum. The reason that it seems counterintuitive is that is that we are not ordinarily down at the level of the very small, where quantum effects dominate."

"The history of science—especially physics—has in part been the tension between the natural tendency to project our everyday experience on the universe and the universe's noncompliance..."

"Projected upon the natural world... is the idea of privilege. ...Ever since the invention of civilization, there have been privileged classes... some groups that oppress others and that work to maintain these hierarchies of power. The children of the privileged grow up expecting that, through no particular effort of their own, they will retain a privileged position."

"At birth all of us imagine that we are the universe, and we don't distinguish the boundaries between ourselves and those around us. ...in some social situations, there is the sense that we are central, important. ...there was a natural projection of those attitudes upon the universe."

"Once upon a time, the best minds of the human species believed that the planets were attached to crystal spheres. ...Both in classic and in medieval times, it was prominently speculated that gods or angels propelled them, gave them a twirl every now and then. The Newtonian gravitational superstructure replaced angels with GMm/r'2... as science advances, there seems to be less and less for God to do."

"Evolving before our eyes has been a God of the Gaps; that is, whatever it is we cannot explain lately is attributed to God."

"Suppose your father... walked into this room at the ordinary human pace of walking. And suppose just behind him was his father. How long would we have to wait before the ancestor who enters the now-open door is a creature who normally walked on all fours? The answer is a week."

"When you look more generally at life on Earth, you find that it is all the same kind of life. ...It uses about fifty fundamental biological building blocks, organic molecules. ...with trivial exceptions, all organisms on Earth use... an enzyme, to control the rate and direction of the chemistry of life. ...a nucleic acid to encode the hereditary information ...the identical code book for translating nucleic acid language into protein language. ...At the molecular level, we are all virtually identical."

"Let's go back to the solar nebula... with the temperature declining the farther we get from the Sun. ...at different distances from the Sun, different materials will condense out, because they have different vapor pressures or different melting points. ...water condenses out roughly at the vicinity of the Earth, whereas silicates condense out closer to the Sun... you have to go out to somewhere near the present distance of Saturn before methane condenses."

"We find a set of data that strongly implies the presence of complex organic molecules in the outer solar system."

"Carbonaceous meteorites that fall to the Earth... have several percent to as much as 10 percent of complex organic matter in them."

"This is Phobos... Its mean density is known, and it is consistent with organic matter. Deimos... same story."

"The organic molecules found in the gas phase in the atmosphere of Titan by Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft include hydrogen cyanide, cyanoacetylene, butadiene. cyanogen, propylene, propane, acetylene, ethane, ethylene, Methane, likewise. And the principle constituent of the atmosphere, there as here, is molecular nitrogen. It is, I think, very interesting that we have a world in the outer solar system that is loaded with the stuff of life."

"There is a very stunning range of studies... of interstellar organic matter... the cold, dark spaces between the stars are also loaded with organic matter. ...complex organic materials are everywhere."

"The amount of organic matter that could have been produced in the first few hundred million years of Earth history was sufficient to have produced in the present ocean a several-percent solution of organic matter. This is just about the dilution of Knorr's chicken soup, and not that different from the composition either. And chicken soup is widely known to be good for life."

"The origin of life happened in significantly less than 500 million years. ...Six days was once a popular hypothesis. ...A process that happens quickly is a process that is in some sense likely... this evidence suggests that the origin of life was in some sense easy, in some sense sitting in the laws of physics and chemistry."

"If there's nothing in here but atoms, does that make us less or does that make matter more?"

"The hope that if they had intervened many times in human history, surely in the present time, a time of great crisis recognized in the 1960s and '70s and manifestly clear today in the age of fifty-five thousand nuclear weapons, that the extraterrestrials would come and prevent us from doing the worst to ourselves. And in that sense 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."

"Now, it is sometimes said that people who take a skeptical approach to UFOs or ancient astronauts or indeed some varieties of revealed religion are engaging in prejudice. I maintain that this is not prejudice. It is postjudice. That is, not a judgement made before examining the evidence but a judgement made after examining the evidence."

"Let's say there's a molecule that produces a religious experience... a natural molecule that the body produces whose function it is to produce religious experiences, at least on occasion? ...So let's call it "theophorin"...What could the selective advantage of theophorin be? ...to suit us for the quest that was, according to Dostoyevsky, to strive for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship and obey."

"There is no question that religions have historically played the role of making people contented with their lot. ...such a doctrine would be very appealing to the ruling classes of a society. ...Many societies, for this reason alone, encourage the contentment with your lot that the religious premise of heaven affords."

"Many religions lay out a set of precepts... and claim that these instructions were given by a god or gods. For example, the first code of law by Hammurabi of Babylon... was handed to him by the god Marduk... this is a bamboozle... a pious hoax. ...if Hammurabi had merely said, "Here's what I think everybody should do," he would have been much less successful..."

"There is in the lovely Martian landscape not a footprint, not an artifact, not even an old beer can, not a blade of grass, not a kangaroo rat, not even, so far as we can tell, a microbe. Mars and the Moon and Venus... the only planets that we've landed on—are utterly lifeless. ...in our solar system we may discover that there is life only on this world. This says that life is not guaranteed, that life requires something special, something improbable."

"Because it is clear from the fossil record that almost every species that has ever existed is extinct; extinction is the rule, survival is the exception."

"The prediction I can make with the highest confidence is that the most amazing discoveries will be the ones we are not today wise enough to foresee."

"We go about our daily lives understanding almost nothing of the world. We give little thought to the machinery that generates the sun light that makes life possible, to the gravity that glues us to an Earth that would otherwise sent us spinning off into space, or to the atoms of which we are made and on whose stability we fundamentally depend. Few of us spend much time wondering why nature is the way it is, where the cosmos came from, or whether it was always there, if time will one day flow backwards or whether there are ultimate limits to what humans can know. What is the smallest piece of matter, why we remember the past and not the future, and why there is the universe?"

"The whole idea of what happens when you read a book, I find absolutely stunning. Here's some product of a tree, little black squiggles on it, you open it up, and inside your head is the voice of someone speaking, who may have been dead 3000 years, and there he is talking directly to you, what a magical thing that is."

"When there isn't enough food, the body has to make a decision on how to invest the limited foodstuff available to it. Survival comes first, growth comes second. And in this kind of nutritional triage, the body seems obliged to rank learning, last. It sort of it's better to be stupid and alive, than smart and dead."

"Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known."

"If we are alone in the Universe, it sure seems like an awful waste of space."

"Atheism is more than just the knowledge that gods do not exist, and that religion is either a mistake or a fraud. Atheism is an attitude, a frame of mind that looks at the world objectively, fearlessly, always trying to understand all things as a part of nature."

"If it can be destroyed by the truth, it deserves to be destroyed by the truth."

"You can't convince a believer of anything; for their belief is not based on evidence, it's based on a deep seated need to believe."

"The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it."

"We can judge our progress by the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers, our willingness to embrace what is true rather than what feels good."

""This is a deathwatch," Carl told me calmly. "I'm going to die." "No," I protested. "You're going to beat this, just as you have before when it looked hopeless." He turned to me with that same look I had seen countless times in the debates and skirmishes of our twenty years of writing together and being wildly in love. With a mixture of knowing good humor and skepticism, but as ever, not a trace of self-pity, he said wryly, "Well, we'll see who's right about this one." Sam, now five years old, came to see his father for one last time. Although Carl was by now struggling for breath and finding it harder to speak, he managed to compose himself so as not to frighten his little son. "I love you, Sam," was all he could say. "I love you, too, Daddy," Sam said solemnly. Contrary to the fantasies of the fundamentalists, there was no deathbed conversion, no last minute refuge taken in a comforting vision of a heaven or an afterlife. For Carl, what mattered most was what was true, not merely what would make us feel better. Even at this moment when anyone would be forgiven for turning away from the reality of our situation, Carl was unflinching. As we looked deeply into each other's eyes, it was with a shared conviction that our wondrous life together was ending forever."

"When my husband died, because he was so famous and known for not being a believer, many people would come up to me—it still sometimes happens—and ask me if Carl changed at the end and converted to a belief in an afterlife. They also frequently ask me if I think I will see him again. Carl faced his death with unflagging courage and never sought refuge in illusions. The tragedy was that we knew we would never see each other again. I don't ever expect to be reunited with Carl. But, the great thing is that when we were together, for nearly twenty years, we lived with a vivid appreciation of how brief and precious life is. We never trivialized the meaning of death by pretending it was anything other than a final parting. Every single moment that we were alive and we were together was miraculous-not miraculous in the sense of inexplicable or supernatural. We knew we were beneficiaries of chance. ... That pure chance could be so generous and so kind. ... That we could find each other, as Carl wrote so beautifully in Cosmos, you know, in the vastness of space and the immensity of time. ... That we could be together for twenty years. That is something which sustains me and it's much more meaningful. ... The way he treated me and the way I treated him, the way we took care of each other and our family, while he lived. That is so much more important than the idea I will see him someday. I don't think I'll ever see Carl again. But I saw him. We saw each other. We found each other in the cosmos, and that was wonderful."