Quote of the Day… not actually daily, but whenever I encounter one I think worth sharing and there are not too many in sequence. I like quotes as they frequently distill a piece of wisdom into a brief passage, or make other points very succinctly – such as the witticisms of Oscar Wilde.
I came across this excerpt of an interview Carl Sagan did with Charlie Rose. Sagan died in 1996, and the interview was in the last year of his Sagan’s life. He died much too young of myelodysplasia. For my money he nailed the current situation in the world with technology 30 years before the current invasion of AI (artificial intelligence).

“We’ve arranged a society based on science and technology in which nobody understands anything about science and technology. This combustible mixture of ignorance and power sooner or later is going to blow up in our faces. Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions to interrogate those who tell us something is true, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we’re up for grabs for the next charlatan political or religious leader who comes ambling along. It’s a thing that Jefferson lay great stress on. It wasn’t enough, he said, to enshrine some rights in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the people had to be educated and they have to practice their skepticism and their education. Otherwise, we don’t run the government, the government runs us.” ~~ Carl Sagan
“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 key 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.” ~~ Carl Sagan
I originally posted this as one quote, as that is what the source I got it from did. On further research this was actually a mashup of a couple Sagan quotes. The poster eliminated the part in red then continued with a second Sagan quote as if it was part of the first. But it remains valid as far as I am concerned. Both quotes from Sagan on the same subject.
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