Skip to content

Neil Postman Quotes

1931–2003 United States

Neil Postman (8 March 1931 – 5 October 2003) was an American author, educator, media theorist and cultural critic, who eschewed technology, including personal computers in school and cruise control in cars, and is best known for twenty books regarding technology and education and his association with New York University for more than forty years.

United States
Academics
Critics
Editors
Educators

Random Neil Postman quote

23 quotes

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

In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

What ideas are convenient to express inevitably becomes the important content of a culture.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

People will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

There is a difference between rape and seduction, technology can rape a culture or be forced to seduce it.

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

The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Eyeglasses refuted the belief that anatomy is destiny by putting forward the idea that our bodies as well as our minds are improvable.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

The principal strength of the telegraph was its capacity to move information, not collect it, explain it or analyze it.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

What I am claiming here is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

As technical people, we are apt to be preoccupied with scores, not competence.

Language Education in a Knowledge Context (1980)

For even the simplest act of naming a thing is an act of thinking—of comparing one thing with others, selecting certain features in common, ignoring what is different, and making an imaginary category.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

In a world without spiritual or intellectual order, nothing is unbelievable; nothing is predictable, and therefore, nothing comes as a particular surprise.

Informing Ourselves to Death (1990)

There is no such thing in nature as “man” or “tree.” The universe offers no such categories or simplifications; only flux and infinite variety. The photograph documents and celebrates the particularities of this infinite variety. Language makes them comprehensible.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

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.

Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist -- all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)

Gutenberg thought his invention would advance the cause of the Holy Roman See, whereas in fact, it turned out to bring a revolution which destroyed the monopoly of the Church.

Informing Ourselves to Death (1990)

Whether it be "molecule," "fact," "law," "art," "wealth," "gene," ... definitions are hypotheses, and ... embedded in them is a particular philosophical, sociological, or epistemological point of view.

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Neil Postman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.