Science is a way to not fool ourselves.
Carl SaganRead
I believe that the extraordinary should be pursued. But extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Extraordinary claims deserve thorough evidence to support them.
Carl Sagan emphasizes the importance of evidence when encountering remarkable assertions. While he encourages the pursuit of extraordinary ideas and phenomena, he warns that such claims must be backed by substantial proof to be considered credible, thus highlighting a critical aspect of scientific inquiry and skepticism.
Themes
ExtraordinaryEvidenceClaimsScienceSkepticism
In practice
Example use cases
In a debate on the existence of UFOs, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for solid proof.
More from Carl Sagan
All quotes βIn more than one respect, the exploring of the Solar System and homesteading other worlds constitutes the beginning, much more than the end, of history.
Carl SaganRead
How smart does a chimpanzee have to be before killing him constitutes murder?
Carl SaganRead
The hole in the ozone layer is a kind of skywriting. At first it seemed to spell out our continuing complacency before a witch's brew of deadly perils. But perhaps it really tells of a newfound talent to work together to protect the global environment.
Carl SaganRead
There is a reward structure in science that is very interesting: Our highest honors go to those who disprove the findings of the most revered among us. So Einstein is revered not just because he made so many fundamental contributions to science, but because he found an imperfection in the fundamental contribution of Isaac Newton.
Carl SaganRead
The simplest thought, like the concept of the number one, has an elaborate logical underpinning.
Carl SaganRead
Similar quotes
Challenges in medicine are moving from 'Treat the symptoms after the house is on fire' to 'Can we preserve the house intact?'
Elizabeth BlackburnRead
If your experiment needs statistics, you ought to have done a better experiment.
Ernest RutherfordRead
The great tragedy of science - the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.
Thomas HuxleyRead
If you take 100 breast-cancer samples, 100 types of cancer have 100 different hallmarks of mutated genes. You could be nihilistic and say, 'Oh, God, we'll never be able to tackle this!' But there are deep, systematic, organizational principles at work in all that diversity.
Siddhartha MukherjeeRead
Almost everywhere, climate change denial now looks as stupid and as unacceptable as Holocaust denial.
George MonbiotRead
My feeling is that scientific method has the power to account for and interlink all phenomena in the universe, including its origin, using the laws of nature. But that still leaves the laws unexplained.
Paul DaviesRead