Neil Postman Quotes

77 quotes in 1383 categories

• Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
• The price of maintaining membership in the establishment is unquestioning acceptance of authority.
• If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology…
• A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.
• School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we,…
• Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings.
• Television is a non graded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away wtih the idea…
• The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired…
• We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.
• There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological…
• The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on…
• But in the end, science does not provide the answers most of us require. Its story of our origins and of our end is, to…
• Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.
• The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn…
• If we may say that the Age of Andrew Jackson took political life out of the hands of aristocrats and turned it over to the…
• The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.
• Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet,…
• I am not a Luddite. I am suspicious of technology. I am perfectly aware of its benefits, but I also try to pay attention to…
• I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology. A new technology helps to fuel the economy, and…
• In Russia, writers with serious grievances are arrested, while in America they are merely featured on television talk shows, where all that is arrested is…

Browse Neil Postman Quotes by Category