Politics & Power Quote by Carl Sagan

Sagan is doing two things at once: puncturing our reverence for “information” as a sheer quantity, and defending the old-fashioned idea that judgment matters. The opening claim is deliberately extreme, almost conversationally apocalyptic. He stacks the scale - all the books in the world versus one year of city television - to trigger a jolt of vertigo: if that’s true (or even roughly true), then scarcity is no longer our problem. Surplus is.

The subtext is a critique of a culture that treats new channels as new knowledge. Broadcast video, especially in Sagan’s late-20th-century America, is optimized for attention, advertising, and emotion. It’s fast, repetitive, and engineered to be consumed without friction. Books are slow, cumulative, and often resistant. Sagan isn’t nostalgic for paper; he’s warning that the medium’s incentives shape the mind. You can be drenched in “bits” and still be intellectually malnourished.

That final sentence is the knife. “Not all bits have equal value” reads like a scientific understatement, but it’s a moral argument disguised as an engineering principle. In information theory, bits are bits; in civic life, they’re not. A documentary and an ad, a lecture and a panic segment, occupy the same bandwidth while doing opposite work on the public. Sagan’s broader context - his skepticism about pseudoscience and his anxiety over a technologically sophisticated, critically untrained society - is all here. He’s not asking us to unplug; he’s asking us to learn how to weigh, filter, and doubt, especially when the signal is loudest.