Neil Postman World Quotations

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

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

A metaphor is not an ornament. It is an organ of perception. Through metaphors, we see the world as one thing or another.

For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

For in the end, he was trying to tell us 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.

The whole problem with news on television comes down to this: all the words uttered in an hour of news coverage could be printed on a page of a newspaper. And the world cannot be understood in one page.

You can only photograph a fragment of the here and now. The photograph presents the world as object; language, the world as idea.