Top 120 Neil Postman Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.”

— Neil Postman

52. “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

53. “Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of importance to most people and have created at least as many problems for them as they may have solved. In.”

— Neil Postman

54. “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

55. “Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?”

— Neil Postman

56. “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

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

— Neil Postman

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “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

62. “We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

64. “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

65. “It is naive to suppose that something that has been expressed in one form can be expressed in another without significantly changing its meaning, texture or value. Much prose translates fairly well from one language to another, but we know that poetry does not; we may get a rough idea of the sense of a translated poem but usually everything else is lost, especially that which makes it an object of beauty. The translation makes it into something it was not.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

67. “Television is a non graded curriculum and excludes no viewer for any reason, at any time. In other words, in doing away wtih the idea of sequenece and continuity in education, television undermines the idea that sequence and continuity have anything to do with thought itself.”

— Neil Postman

68. “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 purposes. Each tells us something important about where we stand in the universe, and it is foolish to insist that they must despise each other.”

— Neil Postman

69. “In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us.”

— Neil Postman

70. “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

71. “Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”

— Neil Postman

72. “One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

74. “Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a computer has an almost magical tendency to direct attention away from the people in charge of bureaucratic functions and toward itself, as if the computer were the true source of authority. A bureaucrat armed with a computer is the unacknowledged legislator of our age, and a terrible burden to bear.”

— Neil Postman

75. “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

76. “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

77. “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

78. “Without meaning, learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention.”

— Neil Postman

79. “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

80. “America was founded by intellectuals, a rare occurrence in the history of modern nations We might even say that America was founded by intellectuals, from which it has taken us two centuries and a communications revolution to recover.”

— Neil Postman

81. “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

82. “It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in twenty-two minutes. Or if the value of its news is determined by the number of laughs it provides.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

84. “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

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

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

87. “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

88. “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

89. “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

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

— Neil Postman

91. “It is not sufficient to know the right answers. One must also know the questions that produced them. Indeed, one must also know what a question is, for not every sentence that ends with a rising intonation or begins with an interrogative is necessarily a question. There are sentences that look like questions but cannot generate any meaningful answers, and, as Francis Bacon said, if they linger in our minds, they become obstructions to clear thinking.”

— Neil Postman

92. “Certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.”

— Neil Postman

93. “As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.”

— Neil Postman

94. “The spectacle we find in true religions has as its purpose enchantment, not entertainment. The distinction is critical. By endowing things with magic, enchantment is a means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.”

— Neil Postman

95. “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

96. “Thou shalt not write down thy principles, still less print them, lest thou shall be entrapped by them for all time.”

— Neil Postman

97. “Lippmann, for example, wrote in 1920: “There can be no liberty for a community which lacks the means by which to detect lies.”

— Neil Postman

98. “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

99. “Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one’s actions or change one’s purpose.”

— Neil Postman

100. “We do not see nature or intelligence or human motivation or ideology as “it” is but only as our languages are. And our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.”

— Neil Postman