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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
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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
World
Metaphors
Ornaments
Organ
Organs
Metaphor
Perception
Another
Thing
Ornament
More quotes by Neil Postman
Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.
Neil Postman
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
As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
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We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.
Neil Postman
'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.
Neil Postman
An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.
Neil Postman
Cyberspace' is a metaphorical idea which is supposed to be the space where your consciousness is located when you're using computer technology on the Internet, for example, and I'm not entirely sure it's such a useful term, but I think that's what most people mean by it.
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There is no escaping from ourselves. The human dilemma is as it has always been, and we solve nothing fundamental by cloaking ourselves in technological glory.
Neil Postman
Public schooling does not serve a public it creates a pubic.
Neil Postman
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.
Neil Postman
When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.
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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.
Neil Postman
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
[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)
Neil Postman
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
Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.
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
Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.
Neil Postman
If students get a sound education in the history, social effects and psychological biases of technology, they may grow to be adults who use technology rather than be used by it.
Neil Postman
. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.
Neil Postman
