Carl Sagan Quotes

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority.

Science progresses best when observations force us to alter our preconceptions.

Although scientists can often be as resistant to new ideas as anyone, the process of science ensures that, over time, good ideas and theories prevail.

One could write a history of science in reverse by assembling the solemn pronouncements of highest authority about what could not be done and could never happen.

There is no falsification before the emergence of a better theory.

It is sometimes important for science to know how to forget the things she is surest of.

A great many things have been pronounced untrue and absurd, and even impossible, by the highest authorities in the age in which they lived, which have afterwards, and, indeed, within a very short period, been found to be both possible and true.

Science is a self-correcting discipline that can, in subsequent generations, show that previous ideas were not correct.

The process of philosophic and scientific enlightenment has shaken the stability of beliefs held explicitly as articles of faith.

Science is the first expression of punk, because it doesn't advance without challenging authority. It doesn't make progress without tearing down what was there before and building upon the structure.

Science has not solved problems, only shifted the points of problems.

Every succeeding scientific discovery makes greater nonsense of old-time conceptions of sovereignty.

Moving forward in science is as much unwinding the distorted thinking of the past as it is putting a clearer idea on the table.

You don’t make progress in science by finding things that are right. You make progress by finding things that are wrong. You won’t win the Nobel Prize by showing Einstein was right. You win the prize by showing that he was wrong.

To the scientist, failure to flip-flop in the face of contradictory evidence is irrational and dangerous behavior. And scientists will often flip-flop at almost light speed. Often it takes only a single observation to flip-flop thousands of scientifically learned people.

No one has a monopoly on truth, and science continues to advance. Yesterday's heresies may be tomorrow's conventional wisdom.

When you have a novel, exciting finding, that gets attention. People are going to push back, and that's honestly how science should work.

One had to be a Newton to notice that the moon is falling, when everyone sees that it doesn't fall.

To the scientists of the Renaissance, your critic was really your ally, helping you advance upon reality. Critics in science are not like drama critics, determining flops and successes. Criticism to scientists is just another means of finding out whether they're wrong, like running another experiment to see if it confirms or refutes a theory. Along with the advocacy principle of the courtroom, It is one of the best ways human beings have evolved to get closer to the truth.

I may conclude this chapter by quoting a saying of Professor Agassiz, that whenever a new and startling fact is brought to light in science, people first say, 'it is not true,' then that 'it is contrary to religion,' and lastly, 'that everybody knew it before.'

Imagine how they would have mocked you if you proclaimed, 'Not only is the world a sphere, but there is an invisible, mystical force that holds everything to its surface'!

The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus. There is no such thing as consensus science. If it's consensus, it isn't science. If it's science, it isn't consensus. Period.

Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's, but apples did not suspend themselves in mid-air, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from apelike ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.

From the dawn of exact knowledge to the present day, observation, experiment, and speculation have gone hand in hand; and, whenever science has halted or strayed from the right path, it has been, either because its votaries have been content with mere unverified or unverifiable speculation (and this is the commonest case, because observation and experiment are hard work, while speculation is amusing); or it has been, because the accumulation of details of observation has for a time excluded speculation.

If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.