Quotes from Neil Postman

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first—the Orwellian—culture becomes a prison. In the second—the Huxleyan—culture becomes a burlesque. No

In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must "draw them pictures" so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.

That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.

We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years."4

The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales

Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.

We believe there are certain things people "have," certain things people "do," and even certain things people "are." These beliefs do not necessarily reflect the structure of reality they simply reflect an habitual way of talking about reality.

These include the beliefs that the primary, if not the only, goal of human labor and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts.

In fact, the assumption that smartness is something you "have" had led to such nonsensical terms as over-and underachievers.

It is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and power

As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.

In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.

schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge's famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.

Introduce an alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.

We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.

The written word is assumed to have been reflected upon and revised by its author, reviewed by authorities and editors.

Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.

Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?

In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.

Tocqueville remarks on this in Democracy in America. "An American," he wrote, "cannot converse, but he can discuss, and his talk falls into a dissertation.

although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes possible a unique mode of discourse by providing a new orientation for thought, for expression, for sensibility.

Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: "There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.