Skip to content

Quotes from Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business — Neil Postman

1931–2003 United States

← All quotes by Neil Postman

13 quotes

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

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)

Attribution

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