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.

Typography fostered the modern idea of individuality, but it destroyed the medieval sense of community and integration.

At its best, schooling can be about how to make a life, which is quite different from how to make a living.

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

A book is an attempt to make through permanent and to contribute to the great conversation conducted by authors of the past. […] The telegraph is suited only to the flashing of messages, each to be quickly replaced by a more up-to-date message. Facts push other facts into and then out of consciousness at speeds that neither permit nor require evaluation. (70)

The shock of twentieth-century technology numbed our brains and we are just beginning to notice the spiritual and social debris that our technology has strewn about us.

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.