It is said that men may not be the dreams of the god, but rather that the gods are the dreams of men.
Carl Sagan[One's] inability to invalidate your hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it true.
Carl SaganScience is not perfect. It's often misused; it's only a tool, but it's the best tool we have. Self-correcting , ever changing, applicable to everything: with this tool, we vanquish the impossible.
Carl SaganArguments from authority carry little weight โ authorities have made mistakes in the past. They will do so again in the future. Perhaps a better way to say it is that in science there are no authorities; at most, there are experts.
Carl SaganScientists constantly get clobbered with the idea that we spent 27 billion dollars on the Apollo programs, and are asked "What more do you want?" We didn't spend it; it was done for political reasons. ... Apollo was a response to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and to the successful orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin. President Kennedy's objective was not to find out the origin of the moon by the end of the decade; rather it was to put a man on the moon and bring him back, and we did that.
Carl SaganHow is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, โThis is better than we thought! The Universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?โ Instead they say, โNo, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.โ A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.
Carl Sagan