In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.
enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.
I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and...
We do not measure a culture based on its output of undisguised trivialities, but what it claims as significant.
It would be a serious mistake to think of Billy Graham or any other television revivalist as a latter-day Jonathan Edwards or Charles Finney. Edwards was one of the most brilliant and creative minds...
It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcoticized by technological diversions
We rarely talk about television, only about what's on television
Today, we must look to the city of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a metaphor of our national character and aspiration, its symbol a thirty-foot-high cardboard picture of a slot machine and a chorus girl. For...
Why, she asked herself, why keep a wound open when forgiveness can close it?
our youth must be shown that not all worthwhile things are instantly accessible and that there are levels of sensibility unknown to them.
A lifelong insomniac, I sleep like one newly dead every night and dream deeply harmonious dreams of swimming along with the current in a clear green river, playing and at home in the water. On the...
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...
If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture.
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.
The television commercial has oriented business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable, which means that the business of business has now become pseudo-therapy....
People of a television culture need "plain language" both aurally and visually, and will even go so far as to require it in some circumstances by law. The Gettysburg Address would probably have been...
Had I been able to formulate my first impressions of the United States, I might have said that there was a place in America called Kansas, where people could find a magic land at the heart of a...
Writing is defined as a conversation with no one and yet with everyone.
Between my first book tour, in 2003, and the next one, in 2009, many of the places I visited had undergone a significant transformation or vanished: Cody's in Berkeley, seven branch libraries in...
The opposite of a correct statement is an incorrect statement. The opposite of a profound truth is another profound truth {Niels Bohr}. By this, he means that we require a larger reading of the human...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you squarely in the eye and said he would rather die than be killed in combat
Reading a novel is not an exercise in censure.
We are all, as Huxley says someplace, Great Abbreviators, meaning that none of us has the wit to know the whole truth, the time to tell it if we believed we did, or an audience so gullible as to...
It just did not make sense; unless, of course, as she had suggested, we all have a weak point, an area of intellectual or emotional vulnerability that may be quite out of keeping with out character.
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not...
If you want to keep a secret, you must also hide it from yourself.
A man's most open actions have a secret side to them. -JOSEPH CONRAD
She hugged her arms around his chest and leaned her head into his shoulder. She did this every night, and like most small demonstrations of love, it had a large impact. Dor felt a surge of calm...
all she said was, I was so lonely. And Father Time said, You were never alone.
Once, he had prided himself on keeping time with water. But man invents nothing God did not create first.
For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if...
The Red Lion was a four-ale bar with a handful of lowbrowed sons of toil who looked as though they...
What could you do? Major Major asked himself again. What could you do with a man who looked you...
If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order...
We all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.
Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the...
Why are they going to disappear him? I don't know. It doesn't make sense. It isn't even good...
fiction is like a spider's web, attached ever so slightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all...
It isn't even good grammar. What the hell does it mean when they disappear somebody?
Read me back the last line. 'Read me back the last line,' read back the corporal who could take...
