Amusing Ourselves to Death Quotes

“Every philosophy is the philosophy of a stage of life, Nietzsche remarked.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In 1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared that what we love will ruin us. This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“From public schools shall general  knowledge flow, For ’tis the people’s sacred  right to know.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“As Xenophanes remarked twenty-five centuries ago, men always make their gods in their own image. But to this, television politics has added a new wrinkle: Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Those who would be gods refashion themselves into images the viewers would have them be.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“pseudo-event,” by which he means an event specifically staged to be reported—”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“An Orwellian world is much easier to recognize, and to oppose, than a Huxleyan.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Lincoln-Douglas debates may be described as expository”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The reporters who cover the White House are ready and able to expose lies, and thus create the grounds for informed and indignant opinion. But apparently the public declines to take an interest. To press reports of White House dissembling, the public has replied with Queen Victoria’s famous line: “We are not amused.” However, here the words mean something the Queen did not have in mind. They mean that what is not amusing does not compel their attention. Perhaps if the President’s lies could be demonstrated by pictures and accompanied by music the public would raise a curious eyebrow.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of “being informed” by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this word almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information—misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information—information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“所有出色的電視節目想達到的目的—要掌聲，不要反思。”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“偽語境是一個文化被無聊、凌亂瑣事和無力感淹沒之後僅餘的慰藉。”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the “information-action ratio.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil's observation that 'Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.' Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The God of the Jews was to exist in the Word and through the Word, an unprecedented conception requiring the highest order of abstract thinking. Iconography thus became blasphemy so that a new kind of God could enter a culture.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Our Ministry of Culture is Huxleyan, not Orwellian. It does everything possible to encourage us to watch continuously. But what we watch is a medium which presents information in a form that renders it simplistic, nonsubstantive, nonhistorical and noncontextual; that is to say, information packaged as entertainment.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“For his perspicacity, George Orwell would have been stymied by this situation; there is nothing "Orwellian" about it. The President does not have the press under his thumb. The New York Times and the Washington Post are not Pravda; the Associated Press is not Tass. And there is no Newspeak here. Lies have not been defined as truth nor truth lies. All that has happened is that the public has adjust to incoherence and been amused into indifference. Which is why Aldous Huxley would not in the least be surprised by the story. Indeed, he prophesied its coming. He believed that it is far more likely that the Western democracies will dance and dream themselves into oblivion than march into it, single file and manacled. Huxley grasped, as Orwell did not, that it is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions. Although Huxley did not specify that television would be our main line to the drug, he would have no difficulty accepting Robert MacNeil's observation that "Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World." Big Brother turns out to be Howdy Doody.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into—what else?—another piece of news.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“You may get a sense of what this means by asking yourself another series of questions: What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them. You may, of course, cast a ballot for someone who claims to have some plans, as well as the power to act. But this you can do only once every two or four years by giving one hour of your time, hardly a satisfying means of expressing the broad range of opinions you hold. Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? For most of us, news of the weather will sometimes have such consequences ; for investors, news of the stock market; perhaps an occasional story about a crime will do it, if by chance the crime occurred near where you live or involved someone you know. 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. This fact is the principal legacy of the telegraph: By generating an abundance of irrelevant information, it dramatically altered what may be called the “information-action ratio.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“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.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Public consciousness has not yet assimilated the point that technology is ideology.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Of course, Orwell was not the first to teach us about the spiritual devastations of tyranny. What is irreplaceable about his work is his insistence that it makes little difference if our wardens are inspired by right- or left-wing ideologies. The gates of the prison are equally impenetrable, surveillance equally rigorous, icon-worship equally pervasive.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“In other words, so far as many reputable studies are concerned, television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Stern reported that 51 percent of viewers could not recall a single item of news a few minutes after viewing a news program on television. Wilson found that the average television viewer could retain only 20 percent of the information contained in a fictional televised news story. Katz et al. found that 21 percent of television viewers could not recall any news items within one hour of broadcast.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“As a television show, and a good one, "Sesame Street" does not encourage children to love school or anything about school. It encourages them to love television.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so, the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research. The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy. The consumer is a patient assured by psycho-dramas.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“By bringing together in compact form all the arts of show business-music, drama, imagery, humor, celebrity-the television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourtselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Radio, of course, is the least likely medium to join in the descent into a Huxleyan world of technological narcotics. It is, after all, particularly well suited to the transmission of rational, complex language. Nonetheless, and even if we disregard radio's captivation by the music industry, we appear to be left with the chilling fact that such language as radio allows us to hear is increasingly primitive, fragmented, and largely aimed at invoking a visceral response;”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business