ayobi

“I 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”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“Many experiments have shown that readers understand and remember material far better when it is expressed in concrete language that allows them to form visual images,”
― Steven Pinker, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

“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 Sagan, Cosmos

“When in the puppet-show of dreams we hold in hand the strings of quite a number of actors, controlling their actions and their speech, we are not aware of this being so. Only one of them is myself, the dreamer. In him I act and speak immediately, while I may be awaiting eagerly and anxiously what another one will reply”
― Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? with Mind and Matter and Autobiographical Sketches