# Quote — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

> What ideas are convenient to express inevitably becomes the important content of a culture.

- Author: [Neil Postman](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neil-postman.md)
- Book: [Amusing Ourselves to Death](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neil-postman/amusing-ourselves-to-death.md)
- Page: 6
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Neil_Postman#Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death:_Public_Discourse_in_the_Age_of_Show_Business_(1985)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/neil-postman/amusing-ourselves-to-death/what-ideas-are

## More from this book

> In a purely oral culture, intelligence is often associated with aphoristic ingenuity, that is, the power to invent compact sayings of wide applicability.

p. 25 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neil-postman/amusing-ourselves-to-death/in-a-purely.md)

> Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist -- all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

p. 12 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neil-postman/amusing-ourselves-to-death/writing-freezes-speech.md)

> Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture's being drained by laughter?

p. 156 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/neil-postman/amusing-ourselves-to-death/everything-in-our.md)