Top 120 Neil Postman Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

2. “Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.”

— Neil Postman

3. “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...”

— Neil Postman

4. “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

5. “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

6. “It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

8. “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. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.”

— Neil Postman

9. “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

10. “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

11. “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

12. “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

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

— Neil Postman

14. “Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its orders from technology.”

— Neil Postman

15. “Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse.”

— Neil Postman

16. “The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.”

— Neil Postman

17. “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

18. “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

19. “By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man ; not of Tree, only a tree.”

— Neil Postman

20. “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

21. “The written word endures, the spoken word disappears.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

24. “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

25. “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

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

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

28. “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

29. “Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.”

— Neil Postman

30. “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

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

— Neil Postman

32. “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

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

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

35. “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

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

— Neil Postman

37. “In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must “draw them pictures” so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without pictures, in a field of concepts and generalizations.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

39. “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

40. “Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it just fine. That is exactly what Aldous Huxley feared was coming, fifty years ago.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

42. “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

43. “But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

45. “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

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

— Neil Postman

47. “As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant. The abundant flow of information had very little or nothing to do with those to whom it was addressed; that is, with any social or intellectual context in which their lives were embedded. Coleridge’s famous line about water everywhere without a drop to drink may serve as a metaphor of a decontextualized information environment: In a sea of information, there was very little of it to use.”

— Neil Postman

48. “But what I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. 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

49. “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

50. “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