Our priests and presidents, our surgeons and lawyers, our educators and newscasters need worry less about satisfying the demands of their discipline than the demands of good showmanship.

Children enter school as question marks and leave as periods.

Everything we know has its origins in questions. Questions, we might say, are the principal intellectual instruments available to human beings.

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.

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)

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

Television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information - misplaced, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information - information that creates the illusion of knowing something, but which in fact leads one away from knowing.