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enchantment is the means through which we may gain access to sacredness. Entertainment is the means through which we distance ourselves from it.

In every tool we create, an idea is embedded that goes beyond the function of the thing itself.

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

Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control some of the contingencies in their lives. What people knew...

It has been demonstrated many times that a culture can survive misinformation and false opinion. It has not yet been demonstrated whether a culture can survive if it takes the measure of the world in...

As Thoreau implied, telegraphy made relevance irrelevant.

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 all had to pay, but not for the crimes we were accused of. There were other scores to settle.

The line-by-line, sequential, continuous form of the printed page slowly began to lose its resonance as a metaphor of how knowledge was to be acquired and how the world was to be understood. "Knowing"...

Hope for some means its loss for others; when the hopeless regain some hope, those in power--the ones who had taken it away--become afraid, more protective of their endangered interests, more...

The Islamic Revolution, as it turned out, did more damage to Islam by using it as an instrument of oppression than any alien ever could have done.

If I turned towards books, it was because they were the only sanctuary I knew, one I needed in order to survive, to protect some aspect of myself that was now in constant retreat.

Marx understood well that the press was not merely a machine but a structure for discourse, which both rules out and insists upon certain kinds of content and, inevitably, a certain kind of audience.

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.

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

We may say then that the contribution of the telegraph to public discourse was to dignify irrelevance and amplify impotence. But this was not all: Telegraphy also made public discourse essentially...

All that has happened is that the public has adjusted to incoherence and been amused into indifference.

Of course, in television's presentation of the news of the day, we may see the Now...this mode of discourse in it's boldest and most embarrassing form. For there, we are presented not only with...

She found the combination intriguing. Because there were three, at all times two sisters holding hands would be facing the same direction. And one would be facing a different way. No matter how you...

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would...

Don't go chasing after the grand theme, the idea, I told my students, as if it is separate from the story itself. The idea or ideas behind the story must come to you through the experience of the...

We were all victims of the arbitrary nature of a totalitarian regime that constantly intruded into the most private corners of our lives and imposed its relentless fictions on us. Was this rule the...

The choice for mankind lies between freedom and happiness and for the great bulk of mankind, happiness is better.

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...

There are outrages and there are outrages, and some are more outrageous than others.Mankind is resilient: the atrocities that horrified us a week ago become acceptable tomorrow.The Death of Socrates...

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...

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...

Nothing often poses in men as wisdom. Spring

If parents wish to preserve childhood for their own children, they must conceive of parenting as an act of rebellion against culture.

Night is done, gone the moon, gone the stars From the skies. Fades the black of night Comes the morn with rosy light. Fold your wings, go to sleep, Rest your gizzards, Safe you'll be for the day....

The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether. To

We create models to explain nature, but the models wind up gatecrashing nature and driving away the original inhabitants.

The television commercial is about products only in the sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales