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carl sagan

via David Grinspoon / YouTube

In 1989, CNN founder Ted Turner asked iconic astrophysicist and science communicator Carl Sagan about his political leanings.

Surely, someone with such a deep understanding of the universe and a passion for humanism would have important insights into how we organize ourselves politically.

"Are you a socialist?" Turner asked Sagan. "I'm not sure what a socialist is," he replied.

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via YouTube

Long before Neil deGrasse Tyson boarded his Ship of the Imagination, Carl Sagan wowed the universe as the orignal host of "Cosmos" in the '70s and '80s. Here he gives a beautiful explanation of the power of books that shouldn't be forgotten:

What an astonishing thing a book is. It's a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you're inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.


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