[Red Badger]

“But there seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously — after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be both ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth. (Most of his fans were just as ignorant and unlettered; the disease was spreading.)” ― Robert A. Heinlein, To Sail Beyond the Sunset

[allendale]

Uneducated, vapid people require hero worship to give meaning to their pathetic lives.

[aquila48]

Prophetic!

[Wuli]

Heinlein is like George Orwell - writing of futures that, though fiction, sometimes reflected directions they saw in bits and pieces of things in their own time.

I think the quote by Heinlein is ever so much as prophetic as Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm.