All Neil Postman Quotes
- It is not entirely true that a TV producer or reporter has complete control over the contents of programs. The interests and inclinations of the… Audience
- Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands… Demand
- The problem in the 19th century with information was that we lived in a culture of information scarcity, and so humanity addressed that problem beginning… Addressed
- TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education,… Co
- When two human beings get together, they're co-present, there is built into it a certain responsibility we have for each other, and when people are… Beings
- People like ourselves may see nothing wondrous in writing, but our anthropologists know how strange and magical it appears to a purely oral people -… Addressing
- We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be… All
- The point is that profound but contradictory ideas may exist side by side, if they are constructed from different materials and methods. and have different… Constructed
- At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living. Attitude
- The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind… Balance
- Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But… Amusement
- Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice.… Adjuncts
- [M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68). Action
- A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph… Attempt
- [It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The… All
- The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.… All
- Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes… All
- Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose... Always Clear
- Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have… Age
- Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better — best of all, ourselves better. This… All