Neil Postman Quotes

77 quotes in 1383 categories

• Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.
• Embedded in every technology there is a powerful idea, sometimes two or three powerful ideas. Like language itself, a technology predisposes us to favor and…
• People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
• As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
• A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.
• The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
• Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
• If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture
• The spectacle we find in true religions has as its purpose enchantment, not entertainment. The distinction is critical. By endowing things with magic, enchantment is…
• My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the…
• When media make war against each other, it is a case of world- views in collision.
• I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it…
• Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance…
• What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.
• Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to…
• It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.
• For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las…
• It is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth…
• It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or,…
• Because he did not have time to read every new book in his field, the great Polish anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski used a simple and efficient…

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