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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| bc678e1 | Shaw once remarked that all professions are conspiracies against the laity. I would go further: in Technopoly, all experts are invested with the charisma of priestliness. Some of our priest-experts are called psychiatrists, some psychologists, some sociologists, some statisticians. The god they serve does not speak of righteousness or goodness or mercy or grace. Their god speaks of efficiency, precision, objectivity. And that is why such co.. | Neil Postman | ||
| ccc464b | Cultivate skepticism as a virtue. In this exercise you will upgrade what Professor Neil Postman of New York University calls your "crap detector." The term is from Ernest Hemingway, who said that it was one of the writer's most important tools. Each day, keep an eye peeled for the most telling instance of lying, deceiving, and distortion or concealment of the truth. This will take no extra time at all, since these messages and images are th.. | Ronald Gross | ||
| 9b7a580 | As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it. | Neil Postman | ||
| e436ee9 | Attend any conference on telecommunications or computer technology, and you will be attending a celebration of innovative machinery that generates, stores, and distributes more information, more conveniently, at greater speed than ever before, To the question "What problem does the information solve?" the answer is usually "How to generate, store and distribute more information, more conveniently, at greater speeds than ever before." This i.. | solutions-in-search-of-problems | Neil Postman | |
| 91c3998 | Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artist. | Neil Postman | ||
| 076e199 | An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate. | Neil Postman | ||
| 8dadcb5 | Technological immodesty is always an acute danger in Technopoly, which encourages it. Technopoly also encourages in-sensitivity to what skills may be lost in the acquisition of new ones. It is important to remember what can be done without computers, and it is also important to remind ourselves of what may be lost when we do use them. | Neil Postman | ||
| 43adec6 | computer technology functions more as a new mode of transportation than as a new means of substantive communication. It moves information--lots of it, fast, and mostly in a calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the fulfillment of Descartes' dream of the mathematization of the world. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful (as when the .. | Neil Postman | ||
| 5897fa7 | We might say that a technology is to a medium as the brain is to the mind. | Neil Postman | ||
| a0df4b6 | on October 16, 1854, in Peoria, Illinois, Douglas delivered a three-hour address to which Lincoln, by agreement, was to respond. When Lincoln's turn came, he reminded the audience that it was already 5 p.m., that he would probably require as much time as Douglas and that Douglas was still scheduled for a rebuttal. He proposed, therefore, that the audience go home, have dinner, and return refreshed for four more hours of talk. 1 The audience.. | Neil Postman | ||
| f8bb9d6 | The number of hours the average American watches TV has remained steady, at about four and a half hours a day, every day (by age sixty-five, a person will have spent twelve uninterrupted years in front of the TV). | Neil Postman | ||
| 3e14d5c | Because we are imperfect souls, our knowledge is imperfect. The history of learning is an adventure in overcoming our errors. There is no sin in being wrong. The sin is in our unwillingness to examine our own beliefs, and in believing that our authorities cannot be wrong. | Neil Postman | ||
| 6035caf | That is why a good reader does not cheer an apt sentence or pause to applaud even an inspired paragraph. Analytic thought is too busy for that, and too detached. | Neil Postman | ||
| e9642ba | Textbooks, it seems to me, are enemies of education, instruments for promoting dogmatism and trivial learning. They may save the teacher some trouble, but the trouble they inflict on the minds of students is a blight and a curse. | Neil Postman | ||
| 133f4f9 | 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. | Neil Postman | ||
| b2bb5fa | Although the general character of print-intelligence would be known to anyone who would be reading this book, you may arrive at a reasonably detailed definition of it by simply considering what is demanded of you as you read this book. You are required, first of all, to remain more or less immobile for a fairly long time. If you cannot do this (with this or any other book), our culture may label you as anything from hyperkinetic to undiscip.. | Neil Postman | ||
| d61fdce | Controlling your body is, however, only a minimal requirement. You must also have learned to pay no attention to the shapes of the letters on the page. You must see through them, so to speak, so that you can go directly to the meanings of the words they form. If you are preoccupied with the shapes of the letters, you will be an intolerably inefficient reader, likely to be thought stupid. | Neil Postman | ||
| 7594a6b | In de loop van de vijf, zes jaar dat ik in Rusland verbleef, ben ik een paar keer door diverse organisaties en individuen gedood dan wel doodverklaard. | morbid russian | Jaroslav Hašek | |
| c0432cc | At that moment Svejk looked as if he had fallen down from the sky from some other planet and he was now looking with naive wonder at a new world where people were demanding from him idiotic nonsense which he had never heard of before . . . . | Jaroslav Hašek | ||
| be412d6 | My soup arrived. Crusted with cheese, golden at the edges. The waiter placed it carefully in front of me, and I broke through the top layer with my spoon and filled it with warm oniony broth, catching bits of soaking bread. The smell took over the table, a warmingness. And because circumstances rarely match, and one afternoon can be a patchwork of both joy and horror, the taste of the soup washed through me. Warm, kind, focused, whole. It w.. | rose-edelstein warmth | Aimee Bender | |
| ea508d3 | The very concept of time travel makes no sense, since time doesn't flow. The fact that we think time passes is just an accident of our nervous systems--of the way things look to us. In reality, time doesn't pass; we pass. Time itself is invariant. It just is. Therefore, past and future aren't separate locations, the way New York and Paris are separate locations. And since the past isn't a location, you can't travel to it. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 1d5963f | I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them." | Michael Crichton | ||
| 9000d8b | Save the Earth" and beneath that, "There's Nowhere Else to Go." | Michael Crichton | ||
| 6b400a3 | There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. --MARK TWAIN | Michael Crichton | ||
| 47ddc0d | They want the Indians eliminated, and the lands opened up to white settlers, but they don't want anybody to get hurt in the process. That just ain't possible. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 3bd5bce | for the last fifteen years we have been under the control of an entirely new complex, far more powerful and far more pervasive. I call it the politico-legal-media complex. The PLM. And | Michael Crichton | ||
| 29248c6 | Alone, Malcolm unrolled the strip of paper that had come with the sample. It was a piece of paper torn from a yellow legal pad. In block printing, it said: I WAS RIGHT AND YOU WERE WRONG. | Michael Crichton | ||
| adc97f8 | if you don't understand something, you can't approximate it. You're really just guessing. | Michael Crichton | ||
| d02f668 | They just posture and pontificate. Nobody tests. Nobody does field research. Nobody dares to solve the problems--because the solution might contradict your philosophy, and for most people clinging to beliefs is more important than succeeding in the world. | Michael Crichton | ||
| c4e00cb | It is an absurd expression of romantic hope. | Michael Crichton | ||
| fc7920e | I have great respect for the corrosive influence of bias, systematic distortions of thought, the power of rationalization, the guises of self-interest, and the inevitability of unintended consequences. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 3fd1836 | Today, everybody expects to be entertained, and they expect to be entertained all the time. Business meetings must be snappy, with bullet lists and animated graphics, so executives aren't bored. Malls and stores must be engaging, so they amuse as well as sell us. Politicians must have pleasing video personalities and tell us only what we want to hear. Schools must be careful not to bore young minds that expect the speed and complexity of te.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| a01157a | Once again, vague terminology helped conceal what was really going on. | Michael Crichton | ||
| b727dee | Like our padded cell?" He poked the insulated walls. "It's like living in a vagina." | Michael Crichton | ||
| 2ee8744 | G.K. Chesterton said (in a somewhat different context), "If you believe in nothing, you'll believe in anything." That" | Michael Crichton | ||
| 010f19d | cupping | Michael Crichton | ||
| 8b2a902 | Control de la mente. Vaya estupidez. Lo cierto era que todo el mundo tenia la mente controlada, y todo el mundo se congratulaba por ello. Los controladores de mente mas poderosos del mundo eran los padres, y eran ellos los que causaban mas danos. Los teoricos solian olvidar que nadie nacia convencional, neurotico o con prejuicios; estas cualidades requerian ayuda ajena. Naturalmente, los padres no tenian intencion de causar dano a sus hijos.. | Michael Crichton | ||
| 597ca16 | If nothing else, school teaches that there is an answer to every question; only in the real world do young people discover that many aspects of life are uncertain, mysterious, and even unknowable. If you have a chance to play in nature, if you are sprayed by a beetle, if the color of a butterfly's wing comes off on your fingers, if you watch a caterpillar spin its cocoon-- you come away with a sense of mystery and uncertainty. The more you .. | books insects knowledge learning life nature plants school | Michael Crichton | |
| f1faeb7 | Fifth hgg | Michael Crichton | ||
| 406d151 | your eyes or changing the subject. You were forced to deal with that person's behavior. The experience was, in the end, a loss of certain illusions. The world was not how you wanted it to be. The world was how it was. | Michael Crichton | ||
| ca79f5e | These Americans played with fire. Hydrogen bombs, megapower lasers, killer drones, shrunken micro-people...Americans were demon-raisers. Americans awakened technological demons they couldn't control, yet they seemed to enjoy the power. | Michael Crichton | ||
| ca2b429 | Not at all. I find it liberating. I believe my life has value, and I don't want to waste it thinking about clothing, | Michael Crichton | ||
| 7fd2253 | Once again, claims of moral superiority are used to justify extreme actions. Once again, the fact that some people are hurt is shrugged off because an abstract cause is said to be greater than any human consequences. Once | Michael Crichton | ||
| 7dd731d | And of course we know that social control is best managed through fear. | Michael Crichton |