If I finish a book a week, I will read only a few thousand books in my lifetime, about a tenth of a percent of the contents of the greatest libraries of our time. The trick is to know which books to read.
Carl SaganEvery thinking person fears nuclear war, and every technological state plans for it.
Everyone knows it is madness, and every nation has an excuse
We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of this memory is called the library
Carl SaganTags: science libraries humanity memory humans library archives humanity-and-society communal-memory
Every kid starts out as a natural-born scientist, and then we beat it out of them. A few trickle through the system with their wonder and enthusiasm for science intact.
Carl SaganFor me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock.
Carl SaganTags: war america usa moon human-nature human hypocrisy cruelty colonialism bomb
You might imagine an uncharitable extraterrestrial observer looking down on our species... - with us excitedly chattering, "The Universe is created for us! We're at the center! Everything pays homage to us!" - and concluding that our pretensions are amusing, our aspirations pathetic, that this must be the planet of the idiots.
Carl SaganThe Earth is the only world known so far to harbour life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit? Yes. Settle? Not yet. Like it or not, for the moment, the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. ... To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another and to preserve, and cherish, the pale blue dot; the only home we've ever known.
Carl SaganWe seem to crave privilege, merited not by our works but by our birth, by the mere fact that, say, we are humans and born on Earth. We might call it the anthropocentric - the 'human-centered' - conceit. This conceit is brought close to culmination in the notion that we are created in God's image: The Creator and Ruler of the entire Universe looks just like me. My, what a coincidence! How convenient and satisfying!
Carl SaganIn every culture we imagined something like our own political system running the Universe Few found the similarity suspicious.
Carl SaganI have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time -- when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what's true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness...
The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance
Tags: prediction reason atheism media 9-11 mysticism predictions reality-tv occupy-wall-street fox-news 99-percent evangelicalism rupert-murdoch media-of-the-united-states future-prediction 9-11-01 globalism proud-ignorance media-barons nostradamus outsourcing
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