Carl Sagan Quotes

Men become civilized, not in proportion to their willingness to believe, but in proportion to their readiness to doubt.

Liberalism is an attitude rather than a set of dogmas - an attitude that insists upon questioning all plausible and self-evident propositions, seeking not to reject them but to find out what evidence there is to support them rather than their possible alternatives.

No simplicity of mind, no obscurity of station, can escape the universal duty of questioning all that we believe.

Believe those who seek the truth; doubt those who find it.

Seek the company of those who are looking for the truth, but run from those who have found it.

I believe that people should be able to question things.

If children were taught to question and think through their beliefs, instead of being taught the superior virtue of faith without question, it is a good bet that there would be no suicide bombers.

I think the appropriate kind of skepticism is this: you've got to be asking questions all the time, you've also got to make sure that you're doing so in the spirit of genuinely wanting to find the answers - and that also means being open. I battle with this: I know I tend to be very skeptical and as a result, I veer towards the dismissive. But being aware of the tendency, I like to challenge my own skepticism and make sure it's not just knee-jerk. You need to be skeptical towards yourself as well. When you're only skeptical outwards you've got an unbalanced skepticism.

An intelligent mind is an inquiring mind. It is not satisfied with explanation, with conclusions. Nor is it a mind that believes, because belief is again another form of conclusion.

We must strive for literacy and education that teach us to never quit questioning and probing at the assumptions of the day.

I say with my own authority that if you go on questioning without accepting anybody's answer, including mine, by and by you will find that the answer is not found but the question disappears.

Doubt is not always a sign that a man is wrong; it may be a sign that he is thinking.

Unless you have the courage to doubt you will never come to know the truth.

Question everything, even if it represents generations of conventional wisdom.

Believe those who seek the truth, doubt those who find it; doubt all, but do not doubt yourself.

The beliefs which we have most warrant for have no safeguard to rest on but a standing invitation to the whole world to prove them unfounded. If the challenge is not accepted, or is accepted and the attempt fails, we are far enough from certainty still; but we have done the best that the existing state of human reason admits of; we have neglected nothing that could give the truth a chance of reaching us.

The stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of the novel comes from having a question for everything. The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry.

A mind that doesn't question its judgements, makes the world very small and dangerous.

The novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct certainties the novel is dead.

The skeptic does not mean him who doubts, but him who investigates or researches, as opposed to him who asserts and thinks that he has found.

The job is to ask questions-it always was-and to ask them as inexorably as I can. And to face the absence of precise answers with a certain humility.

In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted.

As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.

Disinterested intellectual curiosity is the life blood of real civilization.