https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/pfttgo/carl_sagans_foreboding_of_an_america_a_quote_from/nx69poo/
on /r/Books, book quotes censored on Reddit
He was brilliant, but I have so much trouble with this sentiment.
People elected Elon Musk, RFK Jr, and Donald Trump to the White House in November 2024, it continues.
Carl Sagan said "10 second sound bites" in year 1995. Git out a stopwatch and measure Elon Musk twitter message lengths.
A decade before Sagan's 1995 book
In year 1985, a decade earlier:
- "The point all this is leading to is that from its beginning until well into the nineteenth century, America was as dominated by the printed word and an oratory based on the printed word as any society we know of. This situation was only in part a legacy of the Protestant tradition. As Richard Hofstadter reminds us, America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modem nations. “The Founding Fathers,” he writes, “were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics, and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.”40 A society shaped by such men does not easily move in contrary directions. We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover. Hofstadter has written convincingly of our efforts to “recover,” that is to say, of the anti-intellectual strain in American public life, but he concedes that his focus distorts the general picture. It is akin to writing a history of American business by concentrating on the history of bankruptcies."
- New York University (NYU Manhattan). - year 1985 book, page 41. ... "This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business. 1985