Reading is the scourge of childhood because, in a sense, it creates adulthood.

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

As a culture moves from orality to writing to printing to televising, its ideas of truth move with it.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

The way in which the photograph records experience is also different from the way of language. Language makes sense only when it is presented as a sequence of propositions. Meaning is distorted when a word or sentence is, as we say, taken out of context; when a reader or listener is deprived of what was said before, and after. But there is no such thing as a photograph taken out of context, for a photograph does not require one. In fact, the point of photography is to isolate images from context, so as to make them visible in a different way.

. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

The price of maintaining membership in the establishment is unquestioning acceptance of authority.