Neil Postman quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Neil Postman

Neil Postman Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Neil Postman on Wise Famous Quotes.

One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of crap.

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 ...

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

Theory includes a transcendent idea, as do all great world narratives.

In America, the least amusing people are its professional entertainers.

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

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

Enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.

People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears

The credibility of the teller is the ultimate test of the truth of a proposition. (102)

Language has an ideological agenda that is apt to be hidden from view.

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

[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).

Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.

A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.

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

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?

New technologies compete with old ones - for time, for attention, for money, for prestige, but mostly for dominance of their world-view.

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control.

our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them.

We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.

There was a time when educators became famous for providing reasons for learning; now they become famous for inventing a method.

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.

Indeed, the uncertainty principle ensures that in the nature of things physics is unable to do more than make statistical predictions.

We must keep in mind the story of the statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet.

But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.

Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.

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

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

The concept of truth is intimately linked to the biases of forms of expression.

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration

America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.

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 Vegas, Nevada.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

Public schooling does not serve a public; it creates a pubic.

Writing is defined as a conversation with no one and yet with everyone.

Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

What's wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

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

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

Certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

When media make war against each other, it is a case of world- views in collision.

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

All theories are oversimplifications, or at least lead to oversimplification.

Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.

Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.

Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

There is no idea so stupid that you can't find a professor who will believe it.

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

We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television

I mean only to call attention to the fact that there is a certain measure of arbitrariness in the forms that truth-telling may take.

The new focus on the image undermined traditional definitions of information, of news, and, to a large extent, of reality itself.

I mean to suggest that without a transcendent and honorable purpose, schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better.

With the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events.

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

Build an "inclusive narrative" that goes beyond race, class, religion, etc., so that all may participate in the "the great debates".

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture.

The price of maintaining membership in the establishment is unquestioning acceptance of authority.

Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.

The intimations of gravity hung heavy, the meaning passeth all understanding.

Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings.

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.