Neil Postman Quotes - Page 3

Quotes about:

• Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: 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

  Giving, Voting, News

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.69, Penguin

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• 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

  Junk, News, Entertainment

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.159, Penguin

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• 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

  People, Training, Study

  Neil Postman (2011). “The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School”, p.32, Vintage

  28 Copy quote

• We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers-that is to say, as markets.

  Neil Postman

  Children, Objectivity, Ideas

  Neil Postman (2011). “Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology”, p.61, Vintage

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• 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

  Past, Bridges, People

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• 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

  Mean, Understanding, Doe

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.93, Penguin

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

  Neil Postman

  Ideas, Design, Community

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.29, Penguin

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• 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

  Russia, America, Development

  Neil Postman (2011). “Conscientious Objections: Stirring Up Trouble About Language, Technology and Education”, p.11, Vintage

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• 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

  Technology, Trying, Negative

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• My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse; it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.

  Neil Postman

  Creating, Phrases, Use

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.27, Penguin

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• The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing" the facts took on a new meaning, for it did not imply that one understood implications, background, or connections. Telegraphic discourse permitted no time for historical perspectives and gave no priority to the qualitative. To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.

  Neil Postman

  Knowing, Perspective, Priorities

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.70, Penguin

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• [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

  Meaningful, Giving, News

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.68, Penguin

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• 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

  Perception, Ornaments, World

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

  Neil Postman

  Moving, Writing, Ideas

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.24, Penguin

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• 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

  Ideas, Profound, Important

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• 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

  Technology, Doe, Culture

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• Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

  Neil Postman

  Knowing, Culture, Television

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• 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

  Ideas, World, Language

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.72, Penguin

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• 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

  Ideas, Television, Curriculum

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• Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.

  Neil Postman

  Order, Frustrated, Perception

  Neil Postman; Charles Weingartner (1969). “TEACHING AS A SUBVERSIVE ACTIVITY”

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• 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

  Attention, Research, Pay

  Neil Postman, Charles Weingartner (1973). “The school book: for people who want to know what all the hollering is about”

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• A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

  Neil Postman

  Book, Past, Evaluation

  Neil Postman (2005). “Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business”, p.70, Penguin

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• 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

  Reading, Community, Intellectual

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• The scientific method," Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, "is nothing but the normal working of the human mind." That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes. Taking this point of view, we may conclude that science is not physics, biology, or chemistry — is not even a ”subject " — but a moral imperative drawn from a larger narrative whose purpose is to give perspective, balance, and humility to learning.

  Neil Postman

  Mistake, Humility, Views

  "The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School".

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• [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

  Television, Matter, Entertainment

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