219 Quotes by Neil Postman

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.

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...

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

Information is now a commodity that can be bought and sold, or used as a form of entertainment, or worn like a garment to enhance one's status. It comes indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, disconnected from usefulness; we are glutted with information, drowning in information, have no control over it, don't know what to do with it.

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.

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

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

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.

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.