Sedulia's Quotations

Martin Amis: a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander

It was...a symmetrical convenience – for Stalin – that a true description of the Soviet Union exactly resembled a demented slander of the Soviet Union.

–Martin Amis (1949-) in Koba the Dread, a political biography of Stalin

Make America Smart Again

Photo of pro-science protest, Flickr, Mobilus in Mobili

I have a foreboding of an America in my children's or grandchildren's time-- when we're 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 people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and 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.

–Carl Sagan (1934-1996) in The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark (1995)