Quote

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

Neil Postman

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Neil Postman
Age: 72 †
Born: 1931
Born: March 8
Died: 2003
Died: October 5
Author
Communication Scholar
Essayist
Journalist
Media Critic
Pedagogue
Sociologist
University Teacher
Writer
New York City
New York
Truth
Ideas
Writing
Printing
Moves
Move
Moving
Culture

More quotes by Neil Postman

Image
Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
Neil Postman
Image
A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.
Neil Postman
Image
The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.
Neil Postman
Image
. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
Neil Postman
Image
Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.
Neil Postman
Image
The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
Neil Postman
Image
I believe I am not mistaken in saying that Christianity is a demanding and serious religion. When it is delivered as easy and amusing, it is another kind of religion altogether.
Neil Postman
Image
At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.
Neil Postman
Image
I am not a Luddite. I am suspicious of technology. I am perfectly aware of its benefits, but I also try to pay attention to some of the negative effects.
Neil Postman
Image
When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
By itself photography cannot deal with the unseen, the remote, the internal, the abstract, it does not speak of Man, only of a man not of Tree, only a tree.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman
Image
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
Image
The key to all fanatical beliefs is that they are self-confirming....(some beliefs are) fanatical not because they are false, but because they are expressed in such a way that they can never be shown to be false.
Neil Postman
Image
Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.
Neil Postman
Image
The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.
Neil Postman
Image
People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.
Neil Postman
Image
My argument is limited to saying that a major new medium changes the structure of discourse it does so by encouraging certain uses of the intellect, by favoring certain definitions of intelligence and wisdom, and by demanding a certain kind of content - in a phrase, by creating new forms of truth-telling.
Neil Postman
Image
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.
Neil Postman