Top 100 Postman's Quotes
#1. Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman's terms).
J.M. Varner
#2. I have often thought of the postman's bringing me a letter as one of the pleasures I shall miss in heaven.
Elizabeth Gaskell
#3. 'You've got mail!' exclaims the cheery automaton at America Online. The flag on the mailbox icon waves invitingly on my computer screen. For a second, I'm 10 years old again, waiting for the postman's whistle to slice the stillness of an Australian afternoon.
Geraldine Brooks
#4. The promised notification was hanging over her head. The postman's knock within the neighbourhood was beginning to bring its daily terrors -and if reading could banish the idea for even half an hour, it was something gained.
Jane Austen
#5. Novel writing is World Building & Word Weaving (Neil Postman's terms).
J.M. Varner
#6. And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart.
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?
W. H. Auden
#7. Technological change is not additive; it is ecological. A new technology does not merely add something; it changes everything.
Neil Postman
#8. Theory includes a transcendent idea, as do all great world narratives.
Neil Postman
#9. As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
Neil Postman
#10. The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.
Neil Postman
#11. I don't celebrate because I'm only doing my job. When a postman delivers letters, does he celebrate?
Mario Balotelli
#12. You cannot avoid making judgements but you can become more conscious of the way in which you make them. This is critically important because once we judge someone or something we tend to stop thinking about them or it.
Neil Postman
#13. 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
#14. At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.
Neil Postman
#15. The postman wants an autograph. The cab driver wants a picture. The waitress wants a handshake. Everyone wants a piece of you.
John Lennon
#16. Technology imperiously commandeers our most important terminology. It redefines "freedom," "truth," "intelligence," "fact," "wisdom," "memory," "history" - all the words we live by. And it does not pause to tell us. And we do not pause to ask.
Neil Postman
#17. 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 glory.
Neil Postman
#18. Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.
Neil Postman
#19. Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.
Neil Postman
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Umpires are necessary evils. That's just the nature of the beast. For years, people have looked on umpiring as a job they could get any postman to do.
Doug Harvey
#23. Hope is the letter that never arrives delivered by the postman of my fear.
Edward Kowalczyk
#24. 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
#25. Branch Bacardi, star of The Da Vinci Load, To Drill a Mockingbird, The Postman Always Cums Twice, Chitty Chitty Gang Bang, The Twilight Bone, A Tale of Two Titties...
Chuck Palahniuk
#26. 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
#27. Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
Neil Postman
#28. 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.
Neil Postman
#29. When other helpers fail and comforts flee, when the senses decay and the mind moves in a narrower and narrower circle, when the grasshopper is a burden and the postman brings no letters, and even the Royal Family is no longer quite what it was, an obituary column stands fast.
Sylvia Townsend Warner
#30. You can't be half-reaper. That's like saying a postman is half-human and half-postman."
"Or a lawyer is half-demon and half-human?
Darynda Jones
#31. 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
#32. He's like a terrier, Scholes, he won't let go - even the postman would be afraid of him.
Jimmy Magee
#33. We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television
Neil Postman
#34. 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
#35. Perhaps there is no greater test of a man's regularity and easiness of conscience than his readiness to face the postman. Blessed is he who is made happy by the sound of a rat-tat! The good are eager for it; but the naughty tremble at the sound thereof.
William Makepeace Thackeray
#36. Being God's postman is no fun, yar.
Butbutbut: God isn't in this picture.
God knows whose postman I've been.
Salman Rushdie
#37. She looked like the great grandmother of every whore in the world. The devil got his money's worth that night.
Postman always rings twice, James Cain.
James M. Cain
#38. Listen; this world is the lunatic's sphere ,
Don't always agree it's real,
Even with my feet upon it And the postman knowing my door
My address is somewhere else.
Hafez
#39. 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
#40. '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, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.
Neil Postman
#41. People will come to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think
Neil Postman
#42. 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
#43. If efforts to do social work are couched in selfish motives, then they will die a premature death. Why would my efforts get politicised? I have values I inherited from my father. He helped many. Anyone, even a postman knocking on our door would get a glass of water and some sweets.
Sachin Tendulkar
#45. We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.
Neil Postman
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Writing is defined as a conversation with no one and yet with everyone.
Neil Postman
#50. We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?
Neil Postman
#51. 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
#52. Sundays in France have a different atmosphere to other days, with fewer phone calls, no postman, no delivery men and no one banging on the door.
Peter Mayle
#53. My dad was very much a struggling actor and spent more of his life as a postman, as a member of a tarmac firm, as a van driver.
Kate Winslet
#54. I call people 'petal' all the time. My postman is very confused by this.
Sarah Rees Brennan
#55. The literate mind has sown the seeds of its own destruction through the creation of media that render irrelevant those "traditional skills" on which literacy rests.
Neil Postman
#56. Public schooling does not serve a public; it creates a pubic.
Neil Postman
#57. 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
#58. What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.
Neil Postman
#59. 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
#60. Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration
Neil Postman
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. I don't want the giant ego. I don't want to become Kevin Costner, singing on the soundtrack to The Postman.
Joss Whedon
#64. Surrounding every technology are institutions whose organization - not to mention their reason for being - reflects the world-view promoted by the technology.
Neil Postman
#65. Most witches don't believe in gods. They know that the gods exist, of course. They even deal with them occasionally. But they don't believe in them. They know them too well. It would be like believing in the postman.
Terry Pratchett
#66. Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.
Neil Postman
#67. She read the letter again and tried to imagine what it would feel like to be so desperate for a response that you would drop all sense of dignity and propriety and dash from the house at the first sight of the postman.
Charlie Lovett
#68. Indeed, I hope to persuade you that the decline of a print-based epistemology and the accompanying rise of a television-based epistemology has had grave consequences for public life, that we are getting sillier by the minute.
Neil Postman
#69. In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.
Neil Postman
#70. I freely admit that I have many times adopted Jim Oakley's precept of a "bloody good gallop," often with spectacular results. To this day I frequently learn things from farmers, but that was one time when I learned from a postman.
James Herriot
#71. The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
Neil Postman
#72. I like extravagance. Letters which give the postman a stiff back to carry, books which overflow from their covers, sexuality which bursts the thermometers.
Anais Nin
#73. 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
#74. If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.
Neil Postman
#75. There is no denying that the technicalization of terms and problems is a serious form of information control.
Neil Postman
#76. 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
#77. A letter is an unannounced visit, the postman the agent of rude surprises. One ought to reserve an hour a week for receiving letters and afterwards take a bath.
Friedrich Nietzsche
#78. I had gone to New York with no plan at all. I did a lot of jobs - barman, teacher, security guard, postman and construction worker - and I was meeting many eccentric characters, and they were saying funny things, which I always wrote down.
Adrian McKinty
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. The intimations of gravity hung heavy, the meaning passeth all understanding.
Neil Postman
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.
Neil Postman
#85. What's wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies
Neil Postman
#86. 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
#87. I eyed the sheriff. "So I better be breathing when He finds me." "Who the hell are you talking about?" the sheriff blurted.
I chuckled.
The postman sneered at the sheriff. "She means the Demon King. The Devil. This is a phone from Hell - the real one.
H.D. Smith
#88. Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.
Neil Postman
#89. 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
#90. An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
Neil Postman
#91. 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
#92. almost every scholar who has grappled with the question of what reading does to one's habits of mind has concluded that the process encourages rationality; that the sequential, propositional character of the written word fosters what Walter Ong calls the "analytic management of knowledge.
Neil Postman
#93. It is certain that no culture can flourish without narratives of transcendent origin and power
Neil Postman
#94. If the postman is saying hello to you, then I feel like, wow, thats something special.
Patti Smith
#95. When media make war against each other, it is a case of world- views in collision.
Neil Postman
#96. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
Neil Postman
#97. The postman on his bicycle, she envied him, envied his wheels kissing the cobbles, that he knew one language only, one country only, envied his undivided past, undivided from his future.
Anouk Markovits
#98. One way of looking at the history of the human group is that it has been a continuing struggle against the veneration of crap.
Neil Postman
#99. There is no way to help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he perceives a problem to be a problem or whatever is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solution.
Neil Postman
#100. Without a narrative, life has no meaning. Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.
Neil Postman
