Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

School has never really been about individualized learning, but about how to be socialized as a citizen and as a human being, so that we, we have important rules in school, always emphasizing the fact that one is part of a group.

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

If we may say that the Age of Andrew Jackson took political life out of the hands of aristocrats and turned it over to the masses, then we may say, with equal justification, that the Age of Television has taken politics away from the adult mind altogether.

The television commercial is not at all about the character of products to be consumed. It is about the character of the consumers of products. (128)

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer.