Straight from today’s Quotle — here’s who really said it, and the story behind it. Play again

Who really said it

Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known

Not Carl Sagan — actually Sharon Begley Sharon Begley 1956–2021 · Newsweek science journalist
Disputed In copyright

The line is the closing sentence of “Seeking Other Worlds,” a Carl Sagan cover profile in Newsweek of 15 August 1977 — written by reporter Sharon Begley as the article’s kicker, and printed deliberately outside quotation marks because it was the magazine’s voice, not Sagan’s. Begley later confirmed it herself, and Sagan’s estate says he never wrote or spoke the words.

Last verified 15 Jul 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known” not Carl Sagan. Written by reporter Sharon Begley as the closing line of "Seeking Other Worlds," a profile of Sagan in Newsweek, 15 August 1977, p. 53. Sagan's estate confirms he never wrote or spoke the words. Via quotle.info

The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Carl Sagan. Use the credit shown above instead.

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Newsweek (publisher of the 1977 article); Sharon Begley as its author). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

Image direction — grounded in this quote’s real context; paste into your image tool

In context

Evoking the world of Sharon Begley — American science journalist, Newsweek. Theme: "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Minimalist

Minimalist editorial slide for the quote "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known". Clean background, a single muted accent color, generous negative space, subtle paper or linen texture, no literal illustration — let the words carry it. Reserve clear space for a serif quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

Provenance

The line in its real home: a magazine kicker

Source
“Seeking Other Worlds,” Newsweek
Published
15 August 1977 · vol. 90, p. 53
Written by
Sharon Begley — reporting team of David Gelman with Begley (New York), Dewey Gram (Los Angeles) and Evert Clark (Washington)
Relation to Sagan
He is the article’s subject, not its author

But no doubt, there are even stranger discoveries to be made . . . some totally new phenomenon perhaps . . . Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known. Newsweek, 15 Aug 1977, p. 53

The tell is the punctuation. Sagan’s actual words elsewhere in the profile sit inside quotation marks; this closing passage does not. As Quote Investigator ↗ puts it, had Sagan spoken the line it would have been placed within such marks — instead it was written in a reportorial voice.

Quote Investigator: the full origin trail

How we know

  • Quote Investigator ↗ traces the earliest known appearance to the final sentence of “Seeking Other Worlds,” a Sagan profile in Newsweek of 15 August 1977 (vol. 90, p. 53), and concludes that “based on current evidence Sagan did not create this quotation.”
  • The reporter herself settled it. On 13 January 2015 Sharon Begley told Quote Investigator, “The words were not Sagan’s,” explaining that Newsweek house style treated ending a story on a quote as lazy — writers were paid to craft an original, thought-provoking kicker (QI ↗). She confirmed to Check Your Fact ↗ that the saying was her own writing.
  • Sagan’s estate agrees. Pam Abbey of Druyan-Sagan Associates told Check Your Fact ↗: “Carl Sagan never wrote or spoke these words, nor would he” — adding that they were written by a Newsweek reporter profiling him in 1977. The fact-check’s verdict: False.
  • The misreading reached the White House. On 7 October 2009 President Obama told a National Medal of Science ceremony that Sagan “once described his enthusiasm for discovery in very simple terms. He said, ‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known’” (White House transcript ↗).
In copyright

This is not a public-domain quotation. The sentence first appeared in “Seeking Other Worlds,” Newsweek, 15 August 1977 — a work published well after the 1931 US public-domain cutoff, by an identifiable publisher and a named staff writer. Rights therefore rest with Newsweek and with Begley as author; nothing about the line’s long misattribution to Sagan changes that.

Fact-check

The fact-checker’s quote that failed its own fact-check

Few quotations have travelled further on worse paperwork. The line is pinned on Carl Sagan everywhere — posters, mugs, museum gift shops, presidential remarks — and it was never his. It is a magazine writer’s closing flourish that slipped its quotation marks and kept walking.

Carl Sagan Misattributed

Quote Investigator ↗ found no substantive evidence that Sagan crafted the quotation, and concluded he did not create it. His estate is blunter: “Carl Sagan never wrote or spoke these words, nor would he” (Check Your Fact ↗).

A 1982 newspaper columnist, then the Associated Press Spread

Quote Investigator records an Illinois columnist publishing the line credited to Sagan in 1982, and the AP’s “Today in History” feature distributing it to newspapers as Sagan’s in 1988 — the wire-service moment that made it unstoppable (QI ↗).

President Barack Obama Repeated

At the National Medal of Science ceremony on 7 October 2009, Obama quoted the sentence as Sagan’s own description of his enthusiasm for discovery — preserved in the official White House transcript ↗.

The real author is Sharon Begley, the Newsweek reporter who wrote it as the kicker to a profile of Sagan in 1977 — and who confirmed decades later, in four words, that “The words were not Sagan’s” (Quote Investigator ↗).

Context

Why this one stings

There is a particular irony here. Carl Sagan wrote the Baloney Detection Kit — a set of tools for spotting claims that arrive without evidence. The most quoted sentence in his name is a claim that arrives without evidence. Cornell’s Carl Sagan Institute ↗, which uses that very kit to examine the line, lands on a wistful verdict: “Shame he never said it.”

It stuck because it is good — and because it sounds exactly like him. That is precisely the failure mode Sagan warned about: plausibility doing the work that citation should. A sentence written to sound like Sagan, printed inches from his photograph, needed only one careless reader to move it inside quotation marks. Nobody checked for thirty years.

A sentence written about Sagan became a sentence by Sagan — the whole distance travelled on a pair of missing quotation marks.

Read the full story

The mechanism is mundane and worth naming, because it manufactures fake quotes at scale. Profile journalism routinely closes in the writer’s voice, summarising the subject’s outlook in language more lyrical than the subject actually used. Strip that paragraph from its page — as a columnist, a wire editor, or a screenshot does — and the surrounding cues that marked it as the reporter’s vanish. The words remain next to a famous name, and the name absorbs them.

Begley’s account adds the detail that makes it inevitable: Newsweek forbade ending a story on a quote. Writers were paid to invent the closing line. The house style that produced this sentence guaranteed it would be original to the reporter — and the same style guaranteed it would appear, unmarked, in the one position readers most associate with a subject’s last word.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Knowledge Wisdom

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Knownquoteinvestigator.com

The definitive investigation: names the 1977 Newsweek article, page and reporting team, publishes Begley’s 2015 confirmation, and traces the spread through 1982 and the 1988 AP wire.
FACT CHECK: Did Carl Sagan Say It?checkyourfact.com

Verdict False, with the on-record statement from Sagan’s estate that he never wrote or spoke the words.
Misattribution will often carry us to quotes that never werecarlsaganinstitute.cornell.edu

Cornell’s Sagan institute applies Sagan’s own Baloney Detection Kit to the quote and concludes he never said it.
ADS-L: probably not Carl Sagan (2013 thread)listserv.linguistlist.org

The American Dialect Society list post where the Newsweek trail was first laid out and the missing quotation marks flagged as the tell.
Remarks at the National Medal of Science Ceremony, 7 Oct 2009obamawhitehouse.archives.gov

Primary record of the misattribution’s highest-profile repetition, in the official White House transcript.
Sharon Begley, science journalist, dies at 64statnews.com

Obituary of the line’s actual author, covering her 43-year career and her start at Newsweek in 1977.

The reporter who wrote it

The writer behind the words

Sharon Begley

1956–2021 · American science journalist, Newsweek

Sharon Begley joined Newsweek in 1977, one week after graduating from Yale, and spent roughly 25 years there becoming one of America’s most admired science writers. Over a 43-year career she also wrote for The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and STAT, and published books on neuroscience and brain plasticity; she died of lung cancer in January 2021, aged 64. Colleagues remembered her gift for making hard science vivid — a gift that, in her very first year on the job, produced a sentence the world has spent five decades giving to somebody else.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Primary source

David Gelman with Sharon Begley, Dewey Gram, and Evert Clark, “Seeking Other Worlds,” Newsweek 90 (15 August 1977): 53. Earliest documented appearance; the closing sentence is the reporters’ kicker, printed without quotation marks, and is not a quotation of Carl Sagan. Origin established by Garson O’Toole, “Quote Origin: Somewhere, Something Incredible Is Waiting To Be Known,” Quote Investigator, 18 March 2013.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known’?” Last verified 15 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/somewhere-something-incredible-is-waiting-to-be-known

Copied