It is not entirely true that a TV producer or reporter has complete control over the contents of programs. The interests and inclinations of the audience have as much to do with the what is on television as do the ideas of the producer and reporter.

Public schooling does not serve a public; it creates a pubic.

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

'The scientific method,' Thomas Henry Huxley once wrote, 'is nothing but the normal working of the human mind.' That is to say, when the mind is working; that is to say further, when it is engaged in correcting its mistakes.

It is not necessary to conceal anything from a public insensible to contradiction and narcotized by technological diversions.

We do not measure a culture by its output of undisguised trivialities but by what it claims as significant.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it. People gather bundles of sticks to build bridges they never cross. People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.