demon haunted world science as a candle in the dark

In a May 1997 review of that work, Smithsonian magazine described Sagan's motivation for writing it: 'In The Demon-Haunted World, the late astronomer Carl Sagan writes in defense of science and reason in a world he sees as darkened by ignorance, superstition, pseudoscience, deceitful advertising and mindless television.' This excerpt was taken from Sagan’s 1995 book The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark. 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. Science is more than a body of knowledge it is a way of thinking.

This is the excerpt from the passage containing that quote which was shared most frequently: Amid talk of “alternative facts” and a “post-truth” world that dominated the news directly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump on 20 January 2017, a quote from astrophysicist and science communicator Carl Sagan emerged as a viral meme:

Demon haunted world science as a candle in the dark