Amusing Ourselves to Death Quotes

“We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he “is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes ... may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history.... For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“From public schools shall general  knowledge flow, For ’tis the people’s sacred  right to know.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life, Nietzsche remarked.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan. Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us. We are not likely, for example, to be indifferent to the voices of the Sakharovs and the Timmermans and the Walesas. We take arms against such a sea of troubles, buttressed by the spirit of Milton, Bacon, Voltaire, Goethe and Jefferson. But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? 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?
I fear that our philosophers have given us no guidance in this matter.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“reading Amusing Ourselves to Death in 2006, in a society that worships TV and technology as ours does, is nearly an act of defiance, one of those I-didn’t-realize-it-was-dark-until-someone-flipped-the-switch encounters with an illuminating intellect?”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In courtrooms, classrooms, operating rooms, board rooms, churches and even airplanes, 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 commercials.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Wilson found that the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of the information contained in a fictional televised news story. Katz et al. found that 21 percent of television viewers could not recall any news items within one hour of broadcast.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In the book [Postman] makes the point that there is no reflection time in the world anymore,” said a student named Jonathan. “When I go to a restaurant, everyone’s on their cell phone, talking or playing games. I have no ability to sit by myself and just think.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Of course, like the brain itself, every technology has an inherent bias. It has within its physical form a predisposition toward being used in certain ways and not others. Only those who know nothing of the history of technology believe that a technology is entirely neutral.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“If a sentence refuses to issue forth a fact, a request, a question, an assertion, an explanation, it is nonsense, a mere grammatical shell.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“A message denotes a specific, concrete statement about the world. But the forms of our media, including the symbols through which they permit conversation, do not make such statements. They are rather like metaphors, working by unobtrusive but powerful implication to enforce their special definitions of reality. Whether we are experiencing the world through the lens of speech or the printed word or the television camera, our media-metaphors classify the world for us, sequencing it, frame it, enlarge it, reduce it, color it, argue a case for what the world is like.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“the photograph was the perfect complement to the flood of telegraphic news-from-nowhere that threatened to submerge readers in a sea of facts from unknown places about strangers with unknown faces. For the photograph gave a concrete reality to the strange-sounding datelines, and attached faces to the unknown names.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing lots of things, not knowing *about* them. Thus to the reverent question posed by Morse - What hath God wrought? - a disturbing answer came back: a neighbourhood of strangers and pointless quantity; a world of fragments and discontinuities.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business