Amusing Ourselves to Death

This book is about the possibility that Huxley, not Orwell, was right.

Our languages are our media. Our media are our metaphors. Our metaphors create the content of our culture.

Like the fish who survive a toxic river and the boatmen who sail on it, there still dwell among us those whose sense of things is largely influenced by older and clearer waters…

The only communication event that could produce such collective attention in today's America is the Superbowl.

When Charles Dickens visited America in 1842, his reception equaled the adulation we offer today to television stars, quarter- backs, and Michael Jackson…

The use of language as a means of complex argument was an important, pleasurable and common form of discourse in almost every public arena…

The telegraph made a three-pronged attack on typography's definition of discourse, introducing on a large scale irrelevance, impotence, and incoherence.

To the telegraph, intelligence meant knowing of lots of things, not knowing about them…

At the end, one could only applaud those performances, which is what a good television program always aims to achieve; that is to say, applause, not reflection.

Had Irving Berlin changed one word in the title of his celebrated song [There’s No Business like Show Business], he would have been as prophetic, albeit more terse, as Aldous Huxley. He need only have written, There's No Business But Show Business.

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

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products.

We now know that "Sesame Street" encourages children to love school only if school is like "Sesame Street."

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.