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Who really said it

The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan

Not Carl Sagan — actually FBI agent Kenneth V. Lanning Kenneth V. Lanning FBI Supervisory Special Agent · Behavioral Science Unit, FBI Academy, Quantico
Verified as Lanning’s — and verified as not Sagan’s own words, from Sagan’s own page. In copyright

Sagan really did print this sentence — but he printed it inside quotation marks. In The Demon-Haunted World (1995), chapter 9, “Therapy,” he introduces it as an excerpt from “FBI expert Lanning’s analysis of ‘Satanic, Occult and Ritualistic Crime’… published in the October 1989 issue of the professional journal, The Police Chief.” The words are Kenneth V. Lanning’s; Sagan was the loudspeaker, not the author.

Last verified 10 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

For presentations

Put it on a slide

Disputed credit — copy with the correction

“The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan” Kenneth V. Lanning, FBI Supervisory Special Agent, "Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective," The Police Chief 56, no. 10 (October 1989): 62–84; quoted by Carl Sagan in The Demon-Haunted World (1995), ch. 9. Commonly misattributed to Sagan himself. · Verbatim: “The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don't like that statement, but few can argue with it.”

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 Kenneth V. Lanning and the publisher of The Police Chief for the 1989 article; Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan / Random House for The Demon-Haunted World (1995)). 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 Kenneth V. Lanning — Behavioral Science Unit, Quantico. Theme: "The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan". 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 "The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan". 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

Kenneth V. Lanning, The Police Chief, October 1989

Words by
Kenneth V. Lanning, FBI Supervisory Special Agent, Behavioral Science Unit
First published in
“Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective,” The Police Chief 56, no. 10 (October 1989): 62–84
Quoted by Sagan in
The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995), ch. 9, “Therapy”
Restated by Lanning in
Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse (FBI, January 1992), p. 13

Within the personal religious belief system of a law enforcement officer, Christianity may be good and satanism evil. Under the Constitution, however, both are neutral. This is an important, but difficult, concept for many law enforcement officers to accept. They are paid to uphold the penal code, not the Ten Commandments… The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan. Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it. Sagan’s ellipsis

As Sagan sets it in chapter 9, uncut. The one ellipsis is his: he splices two stretches of Lanning’s argument into a single block quote — and reverses their order doing it, because in Lanning’s report the “far more crime” sentence comes first. The words are Lanning’s, but Sagan trims inside them too: Lanning wrote that officers are paid “to uphold the Constitution and enforce the penal code, not the Ten Commandments.”

Scanned FBI document (Lanning’s 1992 restatement)
Read Lanning’s FBI Investigator’s Guide, p. 13
The Demon-Haunted World, full-text scan (Internet Archive)

How we traced it

  • Sagan does the attribution himself. Two paragraphs before the block quote he writes that what follows are “excerpts from FBI expert Lanning’s analysis of ‘Satanic, Occult and Ritualistic Crime’… published in the October 1989 issue of the professional journal, The Police Chief” — confirmed in the searchable scan of the book ↗, chapter 9, “Therapy.”
  • An archived text of Lanning’s October 1989 report carries the sentence, reading “God, Jesus, and Mohammed… Many people don’t like this statement, but few can argue with it” — The Lanning Report (1989) ↗.
  • The primary document that survives in a government archive is Lanning’s January 1992 Investigator’s Guide, where he makes the same point in revised words on p. 13 — NCJRS scan, ojp.gov ↗.
  • Neither Wikiquote’s Carl Sagan page ↗ nor Quote Investigator carries an entry for this line, so there is no prior specialist ruling to defer to; the finding above rests on the two Lanning texts and Sagan’s own page.
In copyright

The sentence in its famous form was first published in The Police Chief in October 1989 and reached a mass audience through The Demon-Haunted World in 1995 — both well after 1931, so we treat it as in copyright. One honest wrinkle: Lanning wrote as a serving FBI agent, and Wikisource records his federal output as public domain ↗ under 17 U.S.C. 105 — the 1992 Investigator’s Guide is stamped “Public Domain/FBI” on its cover sheet. That clearance is documented for the 1992 guide, not for the 1989 journal article or for Sagan’s book, so we do not claim public domain for the wording quoted here.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

Sagan said it out loud. He didn’t write it.

This is an unusually clean case: the quotation is real, the wording is accurate, and the book everyone cites genuinely contains it. What the internet lost is the pair of quotation marks around it.

Carl Sagan Mis-credited

Sagan presents the passage as a block quotation and names its author two paragraphs earlier — “FBI expert Lanning’s analysis… published in the October 1989 issue of the professional journal, The Police Chief” (full-text scan ↗). Aggregators kept the book and dropped the agent: AZQuotes ↗ cites the Sagan volume by page and never mentions Lanning, and QuoteFancy ↗ names neither Lanning nor The Police Chief.

Carl Sagan Truncated

The form that circulates as a one-liner — the headline version this page is named for — stops at “in the name of Satan” and loses Lanning’s follow-up, “Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it” — the clause that makes it an argument rather than a jab. Where the second sentence does survive, it is often mangled: AskAtheists ↗ prints “than have in the name of Satan. Most people don’t like that statement…” and credits Sagan. (The bigger aggregators do carry both sentences intact — it is the author they drop, not the words.)

Kenneth V. Lanning Two versions

Lanning kept revising it. The October 1989 text ↗ reads “God, Jesus, and Mohammed… Many people don’t like this statement.” His January 1992 FBI guide ↗, p. 13, broadens it to “God, Jesus, Mohammed, and other mainstream religion” and ends “Many people, including myself, don’t like that statement, but the truth of it is undeniable.” The famous form is the 1989 one as Sagan set it.

Written by Kenneth V. Lanning, FBI Supervisory Special Agent, in “Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective,” The Police Chief, October 1989 — and correctly logged in at least one place ↗ as “Carl Sagan quoting Kenneth V. Lanning.”

Context

Why an FBI man had to say it out loud

By the late 1980s American police departments were being trained, at paid seminars, to look for a nationwide network of satanic cults torturing and murdering children. Kenneth Lanning was the FBI’s own specialist on the sexual victimisation of children, and he had consulted on the cases. He could not find the bodies, the network, or the evidence — and he noticed that a striking number of the people running the seminars were religious believers for whom a literal devil was doctrinally necessary.

The sentence is what happens when that observation is finally said plainly to an audience of police officers. On Sagan’s page it lands right after Lanning’s reminder that under the Constitution Christianity and satanism are legally neutral — but that adjacency is Sagan’s doing. In Lanning’s own October 1989 report the sentence comes earlier, closing his argument about who gets to decide what satanists believe; the neutrality passage comes some way after it, under the later heading “The Law Enforcement Perspective,” where he writes that officers “are paid to uphold the Constitution and enforce the penal code, not the Ten Commandments” — a line Sagan shortens to “paid to uphold the penal code.” Sagan reprinted the passage six years later because it did in one line what his whole chapter was trying to do.

Many people don’t like that statement, but few can argue with it.

How Sagan actually used the passage

Sagan’s block quote is a splice. He joins two separate stretches of Lanning’s argument with an ellipsis — the constitutional-neutrality passage, then the “far more crime and child abuse” sentence. The ellipsis is printed on the page; the join is Sagan’s editing, not Lanning’s sentence order.

Lanning kept revising the thought. The October 1989 text reads “God, Jesus, and Mohammed… Many people don’t like this statement, but few can argue with it.” By January 1992 he had broadened and hardened it: “God, Jesus, Mohammed, and other mainstream religion… Many people, including myself, don’t like that statement, but the truth of it is undeniable.” The version the internet circulates is the 1989 one, in Sagan’s rendering.

Explore

Filed under

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

Truth Justice Power

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.

Lanning, Investigator's Guide to Allegations of "Ritual" Child Abuse (FBI, 1992)ojp.gov

The scanned FBI original, digitised by NCJRS. Lanning's reworded version of the sentence is on p. 13; the cover page is stamped "Public Domain/FBI."
The Lanning Report (1989)xeper.info

Archived full text of Lanning's October 1989 report, carrying the sentence in its original wording — slightly different from Sagan's rendering (see "Two versions" above).
The Demon-Haunted World — full-text scanarchive.org

Sagan's book in searchable full text, including the chapter 9 block quote and his naming of The Police Chief, October 1989 as the source.
Author: Kenneth V. Lanningen.wikisource.org

Wikisource author record listing the 1992 Investigator's Guide and noting that his federal works are public domain under 17 U.S.C. 105.
Ken Lanning — satanic ritual child abuse and confirmation biasjerriwilliams.com

Interview and biography: 30+ years in the FBI, twenty in the Behavioral Science Unit profiling the sexual victimisation of children.
The Demon-Haunted Worlden.wikipedia.org

Publication record for the book that carried the quotation to a mass audience: first published 1995 by Random House, Sagan with Ann Druyan.

The man who actually wrote it

The FBI agent who went looking for Satan and found paperwork

Kenneth V. Lanning

FBI Supervisory Special Agent · Behavioral Science Unit, Quantico

Kenneth V. Lanning served more than thirty years in the FBI, twenty of them in the Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico as a profiler specialising in the sexual victimisation of children. When allegations of “satanic ritual abuse” began reaching him in the early 1980s, he initially believed them — then spent years consulting on case after case and could not find corroborating evidence for the organised cult crimes being described at law-enforcement seminars. His October 1989 analysis and his 1992 Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse became the documents that broke the back of the Satanic Panic from inside American policing, and the line everyone now credits to Carl Sagan is a sentence from that work.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Lanning, “Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime” (1989), via Sagan (1995)

Kenneth V. Lanning, “Satanic, Occult, Ritualistic Crime: A Law Enforcement Perspective,” The Police Chief 56, no. 10 (October 1989): 62–84; quoted in Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (New York: Random House, 1995), chap. 9, “Therapy.” Lanning restated the point in different words in Investigator’s Guide to Allegations of “Ritual” Child Abuse (Quantico, VA: Behavioral Science Unit, Federal Bureau of Investigation, January 1992), 13.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘The fact is that far more crime and child abuse has been committed by zealots in the name of God, Jesus and Mohammed than has ever been committed in the name of Satan’?” Last verified 10 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/the-fact-is-that-far-more-crime-and-child-abuse-has-been/

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