Top 120 Neil Postman Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 3 of 3

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

— Neil Postman

102. “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

103. “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

104. “Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.”

— Neil Postman

105. “That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

107. “In fact, the assumption that smartness is something you “have” had led to such nonsensical terms as over-and underachievers.”

— Neil Postman

108. “It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense.”

— Neil Postman

109. “Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages in-sensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

111. “I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed.”

— Neil Postman

112. “Intelligence does not have quantity or magnitude, except as we believe that it does. And why do we believe that it does? Because we have tools that imply that this is what the mind is like.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

114. “I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to anyone, not even veteran Nixon-haters. For the alternative possibilities are that one may look like a liar but be telling the truth; or even worse, look like a truth-teller but in fact be lying. As.”

— Neil Postman

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

— Neil Postman

116. “But to the modern mind, resonating with different media-metaphors, the truth in economics is believed to be best discovered and expressed in numbers. Perhaps it is.”

— Neil Postman

117. “The reader must come armed, in a serious state of intellectual readiness. This is not easy because he comes to the text alone. In reading, one’s responses are isolated, one’sintellect thrown back on its own resourses. To be confronted by the cold abstractions of printed sentences is to look upon language bare, without the assistance of either beauty or community. Thus, reading is by its nature a serious business. It is also, of course, an essentially rational activity.”

— Neil Postman

118. “We believe there are certain things people “have,” certain things people “do,” and even certain things people “are.” These beliefs do not necessarily reflect the structure of reality they simply reflect an habitual way of talking about reality.”

— Neil Postman

119. “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

120. “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

121. “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

122. “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

123. “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

124. “Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment. In America, we are never denied the opportunity to amuse ourselves.”

— Neil Postman

125. “The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.”

— Neil Postman

126. “How people think about time and space, and about things and processes, will be greatly influenced by the grammatical features of their language.”

— Neil Postman

127. “We look at the television screen and ask, in the same voracious way as the Queen in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, “Mirror, mirror on the wall, who is the fairest one of all?” We are inclined to vote for those whose personality, family life, and style, as imaged on the screen, give back a better answer than the Queen received.”

— Neil Postman

128. “It is quite probable that the most original problem solving activity students engage in school is related to the invention of systems for beating the system.”

— Neil Postman

129. “But statistics, like any other technology, has a tendency to run out of control, to occupy more of our mental space than it warrants, to invade realms of discourse where it can only wreak havoc. When it is out of control, statistics buries in a heap of trivia what is necessary to know.”

— Neil Postman

130. “Introduce an alphabet to a culture and you change its cognitive habits, its social relations, its notions of community, history and religion. Introduce the printing press with movable type, and you do the same. Introduce speed-of-light transmission of images and you make a cultural revolution. Without a vote. Without polemics. Without guerrilla resistance. Here is ideology, pure if not serene.”

— Neil Postman