“ 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 fragme… Neil Postman
“ What we are confronted with now is the problem posed by the economic and symbolic structure of television. Those who run television do not limit our access to information but in fact widen it. Our Min… Neil Postman
“ We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn't, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror… Neil Postman
“ The point is that television does not reveal who the best man is. In fact, television makes impossible the determination of who is better than whom, if we mean by 'better' such things as more capable… Neil Postman
“ The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science an… Neil Postman
“ Exposition is a mode of thought, a method of learning, and a means of expression. Almost all of the characteristics we associate with mature discourse were amplified by typography, which has the stron… Neil Postman
“ I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and… Neil Postman
“ Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commo… 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 overgeneraliz… Neil Postman
“ Watch a man--say, a politician--being interviewed on television, an you are observing a demonstration of what both he and his interrogators learned in school: all questions have answers, and it is a g… Neil Postman
“ 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
“ The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. Knowing t… Neil Postman
“ In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself. Neil Postman
“ But it is not time constraints alone that produce such fragmented and discontinuous language. When a television show is in process, it is very nearly impermissible to say, Let me think about that or I… Neil Postman
“ In saying no one knew about the ideas implicit in the telegraph, I am not quite accurate. Thoreau knew. Or so one may surmise. It is alleged that upon being told that through the telegraph a man in Ma… Neil Postman
“ 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… Neil Postman
“ We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially inc… Neil Postman
“ Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew… Neil Postman
“ The question is not, Does or doesn't public schooling create a public? The question is, What kind of public does it create? A conglomerate of self-indulgent consumers? Angry, soulless, directionless m… Neil Postman
“ How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past (and commissars of the present) to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest. Neil Postman
