219 Quotes by Neil Postman

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

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.

We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.”4.

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.

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.

Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information – misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information – information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.

Our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them.

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.

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.