Quotes by Neil Postman

About Neil Postman:

Neil Postman is best known for his seventeen books, including Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985), Conscientious Objections (1988), Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology (1992), The Disappearance of Childhood (1994) and The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School (1995).
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

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

Neil Postman

We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.

Neil Postman

. . . we come astonishingly close to the mystical beliefs of and his followers who attempted to submit all of life to the sovereignty of numbers. Many of our psychologists, sociologists, economists and other latter-day cabalists will have numbers to ...

Neil Postman

Every television program must be a complete package in itself. No previous knowledge is to be required. There must not be even a hint that learning is hierarchical, that it is an edifice constructed on a foundation. The learner must be allowed to ent...

Neil Postman

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...

Neil Postman

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

Neil Postman

This is the lesson of all great television commercials: They provide a slogan, a symbol or a focus that creates for viewers a comprehensive and compelling image of themselves. In the shift from party politics to television politics, the same goal is ...

Neil Postman

The modern idea of testing a reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but comprehending?

Neil Postman

To engage the written word means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning. It means to uncover lies, confusions, and overgeneralizations, to detect abuses of logic and common sense...

Neil Postman

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions

Neil Postman

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

Neil Postman

Of course, in television's presentation of the "news of the day," we may see the Now...this" mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with fragmented news but news without context, without con...

Neil Postman

We rarely talk about television, only about what’s on television

Neil Postman

What’s wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies

Neil Postman

Many decisions about the form and content of news programs are made on the basis of information about the viewer, the purpose of which is to keep the viewers watching so that they will be exposed to the commercials

Neil Postman

There is no way to help a learner to be disciplined, active, and thoroughly engaged unless he perceives a problem to be a problem or whatever is to-be-learned as worth learning, and unless he plays an active role in determining the process of solutio...

Neil Postman

At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

Neil Postman

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

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

Neil Postman

It is not entirely true that a TV producer or reporter has complete control over the contents of programs. The interests and inclinations of the audience have as much to do with the what is on television as do the ideas of the producer and reporter.

Neil Postman

Author Bio

  • NameNeil Postman
  • DescriptionAmerican writer and academic
  • BornMarch 8, 1931
  • DiedOctober 5, 2003
  • CountryUnited States Of America
  • ProfessionSociologist; Essayist; Educationist; Media Critic; Writer