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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
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Random Neil Postman quote

23 quotes

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

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

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category.

The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)

One of the insidious facts about totalitarianism is its seeming "efficiency." …Democracy — with all of its inefficiency — is still the best system we have so far for enhancing the prospects of our mutual survival.

Teaching as a Subversive Activity (1969)

Attribution

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