Some Provocative Thoughts By the Late Great Carl Sagan

 

Bust of Carl Sagan

For some time now, I have been collecting quotes by noted scientist, author and television personality, the late Carl Sagan.  

Here's the thing: I did not really know what to do with these collected quotes. I mean, they were not just interesting, but fascinating. Extremely thought-provoking, as almost everything that this man said tended to be.

It occurred to me that the best thing to do with these quotes was to share them here. And so that is what I am opting to do. Hopefully from here on out, whenever I come across a really great quote by Sagan, it will be shared here.

At least, that is the goal.

Below are some quotes which I recently came across from Carl Sagan, complete with the original source where they can be found. They include his philosophy on science, dreams, evolution and genetic engineering, and a prediction for the future which, I think we can see now, proved to be eerily accurate regarding our own times. 

Take a look:

“Avoidable human misery is more often caused not so much by stupidity as by ignorance, particularly our ignorance about ourselves. I worry that, especially as the Millennium edges nearer, pseudoscience and superstition will seem year by year more tempting, the siren song of unreason more sonorous and attractive. Where have we heard it before? Whenever our ethnic or national prejudices are aroused, in times of scarcity, during challenges to national self-esteem or nerve, when we agonize about our diminished cosmic place and purpose, or when fanaticism is bubbling up around us—then, habits of thought familiar from ages past reach for the controls. The candle flame gutters. Its little pool of light trembles. Darkness gathers. The demons begin to stir.” 

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

"Science" is only a Latin word for "knowledge." And it's hard for me to believe that anyone is opposed to knowledge. I think that science works by a careful balance of two apparently contradictory impulses. One, a synthetic, holistic, hypothesis-spinning capability, which some people believe is localized in the right hemisphere of the cerebral cortex, and an analytic, skeptical, scrutinizing capability, which some people believe is localized in the left hemisphere of the cerebral cortex. And it is only the mix of these two, the generating of creative hypotheses and the scrupulous rejection of those that do not correspond to the facts, that permits science or any other human activity, I believe, to make progress." 

~ Carl Sagan ; The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God 

"We are the product of 4.5 billion years of fortuitous, slow, biological evolution. There is no reason to think that the evolutionary process has stopped. Man is a transitional animal. He is not the climax of creation. The Earth and the Sun have life expectancies of many more billions of years. The future development of man will likely be a cooperative arrangement among controlled biological evolution, genetic engineering, and an intimate partnership between organisms and intelligent machines. But no one is in a position to make accurate predictions of this future evolution. All that is clear is that we cannot remain static." 

~ Carl Sagan ; The Cosmic Connection

"In the previous chapter, I proposed that a major aspect of the dream state might be the unleashing, at night, of R-complex processes that had been largely repressed by the neocortex during the day. But I mentioned that the important symbolic content of dreams showed significant neocortical involvement, although the \ frequently reported impairments in reading, writing, arithmetic and verbal recall suffered in dreams were striking. 

"In addition to the symbolic content of dreams, other aspects of dream imagery point to a neocortical presence in the dream process. For example, I have many times experienced dreams in which the denouement or critical "plot surprise" was possible only because of clues-apparently unimportant-inserted much earlier into the dream content. The entire plot development of the dream must have been in my mind at the time the dream began. (Incidentally, the time taken for dream events has been shown by Dement to be approximately equal to the time the same events would have taken in real life.) While the content of many dreams seems haphazard, others are remarkably well structured; these dreams have a remarkable resemblance to drama."

~ Carl Sagan, The Dragons of Eden: Speculations on the Evolution of Human Intelligence (1977)