Carl Sagan Quotes

Nothing exists except atoms and empty space; everything else is opinion.

The more I think about myself, the more I'm persuaded that, as a person, I really don't exist. That is one of the reasons why I can't believe in any orthodox religion: I cannot believe in my own soul. No, I am a chemical compound, conditioned by environment and education. My "character" is simply a repertoire of acquired tricks, my conversation a repertoire of adaptations and echoes, my "feelings" are dictated by purely physical, external stimuli.

Naturalism and materialism mean essentially the same thing.

Every mental state is also physical.

Contemporary science is based on the philosophy of materialism, which claims that all reality is material or physical.

For more than 200 years, materialists have promised that science will eventually explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry. Believers are sustained by the faith that scientific discoveries will justify their beliefs.

A cold atheistical materialism is the tendency of the so-called material philosophy of the present day.

Anything that's living is a machine. I'm a machine; my children are machines. I can step back and see them as being a bag of skin full of biomolecules that are interacting according to some laws.

If all of this, all the life of a stream of water, can be nothing but a pile of atoms, how much more is possible?

Nothing exists but atoms and the void.

All you are is a bag of particles acting out the laws of physics. That to me is pretty clear.

Thought is matter as much as the floor, the wall, the telephone, are matter.

The mental never influences the physical. It is always the physical that modifies the mental, and when we think that the mind is diseased, it is always an illusion.

If minds are wholly dependent on brains and brains on biochemistry, and biochemistry (in the long run) on the meaningless flux of the atoms, I cannot understand how the thought of those minds should have any more significance than the sound of the wind in the trees.

Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life.

As a single atom man is an enigma: as a whole he is a mathematical problem. As an individual he is a free agent, as a species the offspring of necessity.

Dualism makes the problem insoluble; materialism denies the existence of any phenomenon to study, and hence of any problem.

- Why me? - That is a very Earthling question to ask, Mr. Pilgrim. Why you? Why us for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen bugs trapped in amber? - Yes. - Well, here we are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.

Nature is thought immersed in matter. . .

Metaphysical problems about "mind" versus "matter" arise only from epistemological confusions.

If no God, mankind is a set of bi-pedal carbon units of mostly water. And nothing else

We exist solely because we have a body and a mind ? a mind that arises out of the body. If this were true, we would cease to exist after our body was gone.

Thoughts are no more than electrical surges in the brain. Sexual arousal is no more than a flow of chemicals to certain nerve endings. Sadness is no more than a bit of acid transfixed in the cerebellum. In short, the body is a machine, subject to the same laws of electricity and mechanics as an electron or clock.

The most consistent versions of materialism deny the reality of anything beyond matter - no soul, no spirit, no will, no mind. This is called reductionism: Humans are reduced to biochemical machines.

Part of the rationalist ethos is binding yourself emotionally to an absolutely lawful reductionistic universe - a universe containing no ontologically basic mental things such as souls or magic and pouring all your hope and all your care into that merely real universe and its possibilities, without disappointment.