“All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.”

—  Carl Sagan

40 min 35 sec
Cosmos: A Personal Voyage (1990 Update), The Backbone of Night [Episode 7]
Context: But why had science lost its way in the first place? What appeal could these teachings of Pythagoras and Plato have had for their contemporaries? They provided, I believe, an intellectually respectable justification for a corrupt social order. The mercantile tradition that had led to Ionian science also led to a slave economy. You could get richer if you owned a lot of slaves. Athens in the time of Plato and Aristotle had a vast slave population. All that brave Athenian talk about democracy applied only to a privileged few.

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Carl Sagan 365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

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