Neil Postman Quotes

#1. Wars, crimes, crashes, fires, floods - much of it the social and political equivalent of Adelaide's whooping cough - became the content of what people called the news of the day.

Neil Postman

#2. Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#4. Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization - not to mention their reason for being - reflects the world-view promoted by the technology.

Neil Postman

#5. 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, commerce, religion.

Neil Postman

#6. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of "being informed" by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#8. 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 of good showmanship.

Neil Postman

#9. 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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#13. 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

Neil Postman

#14. Education Research: This is a process whereby serious educators discover knowledge that is well known to everybody, and has been for several centuries. Its principal characteristic is that no one pays any attention to it.

Neil Postman

#15. 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 not been free of it since.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#17. 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, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group.

Neil Postman

#18. The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV).

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#20. What is clear is that, to date, computer technology has served to strengthen Technopoly's hold, to make people believe that technological innovation is synonymous with human progress.

Neil Postman

#21. Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#24. We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#26. 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 and technology taketh away.

Neil Postman

#27. If the press was, as David Riesman called it, "the gunpowder of the mind," the computer, in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#31. People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been largely incomprehensible to a 1985 audience.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#33. 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 a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#36. 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 about us.

Neil Postman

#37. 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 rather than be used by it.

Neil Postman

#38. In tracking what people have to say about schooling, I notice that most of the conversation is about means, rarely about ends ... It is as if we are a nation of technicians, consumed by our expertise in how something should be done, afraid or incapable of thinking about why.

Neil Postman

#39. The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming ... (some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are "false", but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.

Neil Postman

#40. 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 have as much to do with the what is on television as do the ideas of the producer and reporter.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#42. 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.

Neil Postman

#43. We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.

Neil Postman

#44. Many decisions about the form and content of news programs are made on the basis of information about the viewer, the purpose of which is to keep the viewers watching so that they will be exposed to the commercials

Neil Postman

#45. Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent world-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief.

Neil Postman

#46. 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 their development.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#49. 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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#51. Politics, he tells him, is the greatest spectator sport in America. In 1966, Ronald Reagan used a different metaphor. "Politics," he said, "is just like show business."1 Although

Neil Postman

#52. we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge? Here

Neil Postman

#53. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way that Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible, and therefore irrelevant.

Neil Postman

#54. 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 is another kind of religion altogether.

Neil Postman

#55. I am particularly fond of John Lindsay's suggestion that political commercials be banned from television as we now ban cigarette and liquor commercials.

Neil Postman

#56. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.

Neil Postman

#57. How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve?

Neil Postman

#58. 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.

Neil Postman

#59. 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.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#61. [It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. [ ... ] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)

Neil Postman

#62. 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 co-present in family relationships and other relationships, that responsibility is there. You can't just turn off a person. On the Internet, you can.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#64. As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

Neil Postman

#65. 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 any discussion of slowing its growth has to take account of economic consequences. However, it is possible for us to learn how to control our own uses of technology.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#73. Embedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another.

Neil Postman

#74. 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 some of the negative effects.

Neil Postman

#75. Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

Neil Postman

#76. The written word endures, the spoken word disappears

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#78. Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and comercials.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#80. Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#82. For in the end, he was trying to tell us what afflicted the people in 'Brave New World' was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.

Neil Postman

#83. Scripture has at its core such a powerful mythology that even the residue of that mythology is still sufficient to serve as an exacting control mechanism for some people. It provides, first of all, a theory about the meaning of life and therefore rules on how one is to conduct oneself.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#86. The modern idea of testing a reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending?

Neil Postman

#87. 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.

Neil Postman

#88. 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 with photography and telegraphy and the - in the 1840s. We tried to solve the problem of overcoming the limitations of space, time, and form.

Neil Postman

#89. 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. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

Neil Postman

#90. [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).

Neil Postman

#91. 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 masses, then we may say, with equal justification, that the Age of Television has taken politics away from the adult mind altogether.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#96. The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a single linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.

Neil Postman

#97. An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate.

Neil Postman

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

Neil Postman

#99. Through the computer, the heralds say, we will make education better, religion better, politics better, our minds better - best of all, ourselves better. This is, of course, nonsense, and only the young or the ignorant or the foolish could believe it.

Neil Postman

#100. 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.

Neil Postman