Quotes from book
Amusing Ourselves to Death

Name: Amusing Ourselves to Death
Author: Neil Postman

Neil Postman

Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business is a book by educator Neil Postman. The book's origins lay in a talk Postman gave to the Frankfurt Book Fair in 1984. He was participating in a panel on George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the contemporary world. In the introduction to his book, Postman said that the contemporary world was better reflected by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, whose public was oppressed by their addiction to amusement, than by Orwell's work, where they were oppressed by state control.

“Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist -- all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.”

Neil Postman book Amusing Ourselves to Death

Ch1: Amusing Ourselves to Death, p. 12
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985)