Chapter 24 Summary and Analysis

Science must be kept free of corruption by politics and mass movements, Sagan says, or it will be nothing better than witchcraft which was created by the church to give the church more power through fear. Witches, political deviants, and weirdos have been singled out for persecution since the earliest times, most recently in Nazi Germany and in Soviet Russia. The extreme efforts by these two dictatorships to control speech and thought, especially political behavior, makes the surrealistic happenings in George Orwell's novel 1984 seem lightweight by comparison.

He notes that one of Thomas Jefferson's first acts as president was to wipe the Alien and Sedition Acts off the books and to pardon those convicted under its wrongheaded provisions. These laws had been enacted by the previous Adams administration to depart any foreigner who spoke or acted in a way deemed suspicious...