Neil Postman Short Quotes

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

Neil Postman
Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

Neil Postman
I don't think any of us can do much about the rapid growth of new technology.

Neil Postman
Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.

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

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

Neil Postman
Printing links the present with forever. It carries personal identity into realms unknown.

Neil Postman
Language education... may achieve what George Bernard Shaw asserted is the function of art.

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

Neil Postman
People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

Neil Postman
We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?

Neil Postman
The price of maintaining membership in the establishment is unquestioning acceptance of authority.

Neil Postman
An educated mind is practiced in the uses of reason, which inevitably leads to a skeptical outlook.

Neil Postman
As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

Neil Postman
At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

Neil Postman
.. Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

Neil Postman
We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.

Neil Postman
In the development of intelligence nothing can be more "basic" than learning how to ask productive questions.

Neil Postman
Remember: in order for a perception to change one must be frustrated in one's actions or change one's purpose.

Neil Postman
Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.

Neil Postman
Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

Neil Postman
If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture

Neil Postman
Why do we think technology is above morality?... The real question is, 'How should I conduct my life?' rather than 'What tools should I use?'.

Neil Postman
I mean to suggest that without a transcendent and honorable purpose, schooling must reach its finish, and the sooner we are done with it, the better.

Neil Postman
In order to understand what kind of behaviors classrooms promote, one must become accustomed to observing what, in fact, students actually do in them.

Neil Postman
If politics is like show business, then the idea is not to pursue excellence, clarity or honesty but to appear as if you are, which is another matter altogether.

Neil Postman
The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.

Neil Postman
The word educate is closely related to the word educe. In the oldest pedagogic sense of the term, this meant a drawing out of a person something potential or latent.

Neil Postman
It is a mistake to suppose that any technological innovation has a one-sided effect. Every technology is both a burden and a blessing; not either-or, but this-and-that.

Neil Postman
The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

Neil Postman