QuotesCosmos
Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)
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Freud's view was that "at bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."... The view here is that we start out with a sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient... There's a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn't like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. ...one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it's not required to think for oneself very much. There's something calming about that. ...according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions.

— Carl Sagan on Sigmund Freud

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Freud's view was that "at bottom God is nothing more than an exalted father."... The view here is that we start out with a sense that our parents are omnipotent and omniscient... There's a part of us that has been inducted into a dominance hierarchy and doesn't like the uncertainty of having to deal with things for ourselves. ...one of the many reasons that are given for the advantages of military life and other powerfully hierarchical societies is that it's not required to think for oneself very much. There's something calming about that. ...according to Freud, we then foist upon the cosmos our own emotional predispositions." in the context of "Carl Sagan, The Varieties of Scientific Experience: A Personal View of the Search for God (2006)" to mean that wisdom is timeless.

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Source: Wikiquote: "Sigmund Freud" (Quotes about Freud: Sorted by author surname) The 'What it means' explanation text was generated by Google Gemini Flash (accessed January 18, 2026). https://gemini.google.com/app

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#Carl Sagan#theres#view#predispositions#hierarchical#uncertainty#omnipotent#omniscient#advantages#powerfully#dominance#hierarchy
Carl Sagan

About Carl Sagan

Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996) was an American astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, astrobiologist, author, and science communicator. His best known scientific contribution is research on extraterrestrial life, including experimental demonstration of the production of amino acids from basic chemicals by radiation. Sagan assembled the first physical messages sent into space, the Pioneer plaque and the Voyager Golden Record, universal messages that could potentially be understood by any extraterrestrial intelligence that might find them. Sagan argued the hypothesis, accepted since, that the high surface temperatures of Venus can be attributed to, and calculated using, the greenhouse effect. He testified to the US Congress in 1985 that the greenhouse effect will change the earth's climate system.