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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.

— Neil Postman The Disappearance of Childhood (1982)

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More quotes by Neil Postman

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)

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A generation which ignores history has no past —and no future.

Robert A. Heinlein Time Enough for Love (1973)

From now on, everything in life will appear blurry to me. What’s the point of wiping my glasses when my vision has already left me?"

Sanu Sharma

You can never plan the future by the past.

Edmund Burke A Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791)

Nothing is there to come, and nothing past,
But an eternal now does always last.

Abraham Cowley Poems (1656)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: Neil Postman (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.