Neil Postman Quotes

People in distress will sometimes prefer a problem that is familiar to a solution that is not.

a fellow is more afraid of the trouble he might have than he ever is of the trouble he's already got. He'll cling to trouble he's used to before he'll risk a change. Yes. A man will talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks. But it's the dead folks that do him the damage. It's the dead ones that lay quiet in one place and dont try to hold him, that he cant escape from.

The cloak of the past is cut from patches of feeling ,and sewn with rebus threads.Most of the time , the best we can do is wrap it around ourselves for comfort or drag it behind us as we struggle to go on .

You get so used to a world that you complain, but never actually want anything different. Why crave the unfamiliar?

I feel like I’ve been saving up a lot of things, and I don’t know what.

I understand that change is frightening for people, especially if there's nothing to go to. It's best to stay where you are. I understand that.

It's the nature of the beast within us to keep going back to the familiar rather than to strap on faith and face the future.

Most of us prefer to walk backward into the future, a posture that may be uncomfortable but which at least allows us to keep on looking at familiar things as long as we can.

People don't want novelty - they want the reassurance of familiarity. No-one wants to be challenged, no-one wants to have their minds blown. There is an insatiable appetite for affirmation.

Man... cannot learn to forget, but hangs on the past: however far or fast he runs, that chain runs with him.

For many people, change is more threatening than challenging. They see it as the destroyer of what is familiar and comfortable rather than the creator of what is new and exciting.

Why do people persist in a dissatisfying relationship, unwilling either to work toward solutions or end it and move on? It's because they know changing will lead to the unknown, and most people believe that the unknown will be much more painful than what they're already experiencing.

The human ego prefers anything, just about anything, to falling, or changing, or dying. The ego is that part of you that loves the status quo – even when it's not working. It attaches to past and present and fears the future.

People will suffer almost anything, as long as it means they don't have to change.

You ever want to see real witchcraft, you watch people protecting their comfort, their beliefs.

The world is wrong. You can't put the past behind you. It's buried in you; it's turned your flesh into its own cupboard. Not everything remembered is useful but it all comes from the world to be stored in you. Who did what to whom on which day? Who said that? She said what? What did he just do? Did she really say that? He said what? What did she do? Did I hear what I think I heard? Did that just come out of my mouth, his mouth, your mouth? Do you remember when you sighed?

I like working with people I know. It saves a lot of awkward conversations and getting-to-know-you kinda moments. You trust the people if you know them.

The past will find a way to squeeze into the present–if you let it.

The whole nostalgia thing, and just sticking with what you always liked and what you know and not taking a chance on something or expanding. I think especially after a certain age.

I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me. They are gone, and I resume the journey of my story.’ (David Copperfield) “But all that night he lay awake because the phantoms of those days were not gone. Like the tiny, terrible holes in the prophylactics, the phantoms of those days were not easy to detect—and their meaning was unknown—but they were there.

I hate change more than almost anything.

The past is strapped to our backs. We do not have to see it; we can always feel it.

People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn't fit with what they already know.

I wonder how many years Suga has been carrying his curse around with him. I forget that other people in the world have broken parts too.

Some things you can never leave behind. They don't belong to the past. They belong to you.