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In a print-culture, we are apt to say of people who are not intelligent that we must "draw them pictures" so that they may understand. Intelligence implies that one can dwell comfortably without...

Until, years from now, when it will be noticed that the massive collection and speed-of-light retrieval of data have been of great value to large-scale organizations but have solved very little of...

I suspect, for example, that the dishonor that now shrouds Richard Nixon results not from the fact that he lied but that on television he looked like a liar. Which, if true, should bring no comfort to...

There are two ways by which the spirit of a culture may be shriveled. In the first-the Orwellian-culture becomes a prison. In the second-the Huxleyan-culture becomes a burlesque. No

As I write, the President of the United States is a former Hollywood movie actor.

Naturally, bureaucrats can be expected to embrace a technology that helps to create the illusion that decisions are not under their control. Because of its seeming intelligence and impartiality, a...

We Americans seem to know everything about the last twenty-four hours but very little of the last sixty centuries or the last sixty years.4

Television, in other words, is transforming our culture into one vast arena for show business. It is entirely possible, of course, that in the end we shall find that delightful, and decide we like it...

I am constantly amazed at how obediently people accept explanations that begin with the words The computer shows … or The computer has determined … It is Technopoly's equivalent of the sentence It...

On the whole human beings want to be good, but not too good, and not quite all the time.

We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation.

the world we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most of us. There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and...

We may have reached the point where cosmetics has replaced ideology as the field of expertise over which a politician must have competent control.

The modern idea of testing a reader's "comprehension," as distinct from something else a reader may be doing, would have seemed an absurdity in 1790 or 1830 or 1860. What else was reading but...

You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age?

our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them.

Do the kinds of things that come from the heart. When you do, you won't be dissatisfied, you won't be envious, you won't be longing for somebody else's things. On the contrary, you'll be overwhelmed...

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one's mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.

What's wrong with turning back the clock if the clock is wrong? We need not be slaves to our technologies

you cannot just be stubborn against something, you need to be sib born for something as well

The best things on television are its junk, and no one and nothing is seriously threatened by it. Besides, we do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims...

We do not refuse to remember; neither do we find it exactly useless to remember. Rather, we are being rendered unfit to remember. For if remembering is to be something more than nostalgia, it requires...

Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of...

Everyone has the right to do what the law does not prohibit, and the law does not prohibit lying to oneself.

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, print put forward a definition of intelligence that gave priority to the objective, rational use of the mind and at the same time encouraged forms of public...

With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them...

television's way of knowing is uncompromisingly hostile to typography's way of knowing; that television's conversations promote incoherence and triviality; that the phrase "serious television" is a...

...On television, religion, like everything else, is presented, quite simply and without apology, as an entertainment. Everything that makes religion an historic, profound, sacred human activity is...

Orthodoxy means not thinking--not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.

Seeing and falling in love was the work of a moment.

Technological change is neither additive nor subtractive. It is ecological. I mean "ecological" in the same sense as the word is used by environmental scientists. One significant change generates...

How delighted would be all the kings, czars and führers of the past {and commissars of the present} to know that censorship is not a necessity when all political discourse takes the form of a jest.