Carl Sagan Quotes

I do suspect we are going to get signs of life elsewhere, but how well prepared are we for this? Have we thought how we will approach them? We need to start thinking about that.

In the face of an absolutely unprecedented emergency, society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization. Either we will change our ways and build an entirely new kind of global society, or they will be changed for us.

The time has come to choose a new direction of global development, to opt for a new civilization.

We should be ready to reach out beyond our planet and beyond our solar system to find out what is really going on out there.

It's feasible that we'll meet other sentient life forms and conduct commerce with them. We don't now have the technology to physically travel outside our solar system for such an exchange to take place, but we are like Columbus centuries ago, learning fast how to get somewhere few think possible.

I think the potential for man is so enormous, if we can stay alive long enough, we're going to be seeing a lot of what Star Trek is projecting.

First and foremost, The Quiet Invasion is a first contact story. What would we do if we actually found evidence of alien life out there? It's also about politics.

We are witnessing an enormous shift of collective consciousness throughout the world. We are at the precipice of great transformation within our culture and government.

A new civilization is emerging in our lives, and blind men everywhere are trying to suppress it.

We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other's dreams

I would love to see what's going to happen with science fiction with peoples' heads, because we still have people running around in the year 2050 or 2100 or 2200 and they have incredible technology and you see the effects: laser beams and rays and beaming down and beaming up. Incredible technical things happening, but everybody is still running around jealous, fighting, whacking, cheating. There's got to be something going on! Some kind of change. I'd like to see something starting to happen in that area, with the psychology of the human being and how that changed.

Would you let the aliens land, please? They might be here to pick me up.

The current paradigm is so thoroughly established that the only way to change is to start over again.

Clearly, what is happening, I think, is there is a kind of global emergence of a new mental order.

The real challenge is to work out what aliens might actually be like.

I've been saying for a long time that I'm hoping to find intelligent life in Washington.

It's abundantly clear that we already have extraterrestrials living among us, and people are stepping forward who can communicate with them.

I believe we are on the edge of a quantum leap into a whole new way of organizing and living as a human family.

It is a sobering thought that Gomer Pyle and the Beverly Hillbillies may be among our chief interstellar emissaries.

There is very little point in trying to urge the world to mend its ways as long as that world is still convinced that its ways are perfectly adequate.

A colossal event is upon us, the birth of a New World Order.

Perhaps the safest thing to do at the outset, if technology permits, is to send music. This language may be the best we have for explaining what we are like to others in space, with least ambiguity. I would vote for Bach, all of Bach, streamed out into space, over and over again. We would be bragging of course, but it is surely excusable to put the best possible face on at the beginning of such an acquaintance. We can tell the harder truths later.

When people speak of ideas that revolutionize society, they do but express the fact that within the old society, the elements of a new one have been created, and that the dissolution of the old ideas keeps even pace with the dissolution of the old conditions of existence.

I can conceive of no nightmare so terrifying as establishing communication with a so-called superior (or, if you wish, advanced) technology in outer space.

We may be living at that moment, on the cusp, when we go from being a species that feels a kind of loneliness in the cosmos to actually one sometime in the not too distant future being able to confirm the existence of other intelligent life.