Neil Postman Quotes

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture

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

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.

Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings.

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

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

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

Once you have learned to ask questions - relevant and appropriate and substantial questions - you have learned how to learn and no one can keep you from learning whatever you want or need to know.

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.

The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.

It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.

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.

The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?

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.

An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

Computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions. The computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense.

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

Technology always has unforeseen consequences, and it is not always clear, at the beginning, who or what will win, and who or what will lose.

Public schooling does not serve a public; it creates a pubic.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.

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.

Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears

Certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.

I mean to suggest that without a transcendent and honorable purpose, schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better.

The effects of technology are always unpredictable. But they are not always inevitable.

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.

[M]ost of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action. (68).

Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.

It is inescapable that every culture must negotiate with technology, whether it does so intelligently or not. A bargain is struck in which technology giveth and technology taketh away.

. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.

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.

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

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

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

For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Nothing could be more misleading than the idea that computer technology introduced the age of information. The printing press began that age, and we have not been free of it since.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. (128)

Voting is the next-to-last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge, of course, is giving your opinion to a pollster.

A definition is the start of an argument, not the end of one.

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.

Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.

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

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

When media make war against each other, it is a case of world-views in collision.