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Book: Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Quotes of Book: Amusing Ourselves to Death:
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  1. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    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, nothing will come to mind. This is the difference between thinking in a word-centered culture and thinking in an image-centered culture.
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  2. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    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 wrote continuously about the necessity of our understanding the politics and epistemology of media. For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
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  3. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid.
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  4. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    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 demanded of you as you read this book. You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this {with this or any other book}, our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undisciplined; in any case, as suffering from some sort of intellectual deficiency.
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  5. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    But most of our daily news is inert, consisting of information that gives us something to talk about but cannot lead to any meaningful action.
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  6. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    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.
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  7. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day {by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV}.
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  8. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    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 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. 1 The audience amiably agreed, and matters proceeded as Lincoln had outlined.
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  9. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind.
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  10. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.
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  11. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    But 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. Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To
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  12. Neil Postman _ Amusing Ourselves to Death:

    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.
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