Amusing Ourselves to Death

by

Neil Postman

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on Amusing Ourselves makes teaching easy.
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Foreward Quotes

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

Related Characters: Aldous Huxley, George Orwell
Page Number: xx
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1 Quotes

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

Page Number: 15
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

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…

Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3 Quotes

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

Related Symbols: Thomas Paine’s Common Sense
Page Number: 35
Explanation and Analysis:

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

Page Number: 39
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 4 Quotes

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

Page Number: 47
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 5 Quotes

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

Page Number: 65
Explanation and Analysis:

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

Page Number: 70
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

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.

Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Aldous Huxley
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

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

Page Number: 106
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

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.

Page Number: 126
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 10 Quotes

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

Page Number: 143
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Aldous Huxley
Page Number: 163
Explanation and Analysis:
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