All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.
On October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln’s turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already...
If remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires a contextual basis—a theory, a vision, a metaphor—something within which facts can be organized and patterns discerned.
Although culture is a creation of speech, it is recreated anew by every medium of communication—from painting to hieroglyphs to the alphabet to television. Each medium, like language itself, makes pos...
Wenn wir weiterhin die Wissenschaft oder die Heilige Schrift so lesen, als gäben sie uns die Wahrheit direkt und definitiv, dann werden alle darin enthaltenen Hoffnungen und Versprechen zu Staub. Eine...
The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales,
That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached.
Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist.
Think of Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Billy Graham, or even Albert Einstein, and what will come to your mind is an image, a picture of face, (in Einstein's case, a photograph of a face). Of words,...
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 comprehend...
Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is dem...
The world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consist...
We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.
We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.
Ich meine damit eine Geschichte. Aber nicht irgendeine Geschichte. Ich denke an große Erzählungen – Erzählungen, die tief und komplex genug sind, um Erklärungen hinsichtlich der Herkunft und der Zukun...
Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine...
What I suggest here as a solution is what Aldous Huxley suggested, as well. And I can do no better than he. He believed with H. G. Wells that we are in a race between education and disaster, and he wr...
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 t...
In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question.
In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must draw them pictures so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without picture...