219 Quotes by Neil Postman

We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to accept it.

Finalmente, Huxley intentaba decirnos que lo que afligía a la gente en “Un mundo feliz” no era que estaban riendo en lugar de pensar, sino que no sabían de qué se reían y por qué habían dejado de pensar.

If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears

enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public discourse with serious, logically ordered content. It is no accident that the Age of Reason was coexistent with that growth of a print culture, first in Europe and then in America.

Perhaps we should abandon the whole idea of trying to make students intelligent and focus on the idea of making them less ignorant. Doctors do not generally concern themselves with health; they concentrate on sickness. And lawyers don't think too much about justice; they think about cases of injustice. Using this model in teaching would imply identifying and understanding various forms of ignorance and working to eliminate as many of them as we can.

La inteligencia se define fundamentalmente como nuestra capacidad para captar la verdad de las cosas.

خشي أورْوِل من الذين سيحظرون تداول الكتب. أما هكسلي فقد خشي ألا يضطروا لمنعها، إذ لا أحد سيرغب في قراءتها.