Zbigniew Brzezinski Quotes

Education... has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worth while. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter.

The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.

The public's not stupid.

The multitude of books is making us ignorant.

The Internet has done a wonderful thing for us. But democracy doesn't work unless people are well informed, and I don't know that we are. People just don't have the time.

In the age of information, ignorance is a choice.

The paradox of education is precisely this - that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.

I kind of live in this weird world where I am exposed to a lot of stuff, but then again I am not exposed to a lot of stuff.

Never before in human history has more information been available to more people. But at the same time, never before in human history has more bad information been available to more people.

I think we risk becoming the best informed society that has ever died of ignorance.

Businessmen are not in business to lose customers, and schools do not exist to free their clients from the agencies of mass persuasion. School and media possess a productive monopoly upon the imagination of a child.

All I know is just what I read in the papers, and that's an alibi for my ignorance.

If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well viewed.

We live in an increasingly sophisticated world that makes it difficult to make simple comments on stuff. There are too many people on both sides of the border who are taking advantage of circumstances and the situation.

The smarter the journalists are, the better off society is. For to a degree, people read the press to inform themselves - and the better the teacher, the better the student body.

The more complex our world becomes, the more we rely on that electronic window to help us process it all. And the greater the responsibility we must shoulder to see that it is used as fairly as it is fearlessly.

The temptation to inculcate rather than to educate is understandably strong among long frustrated populations. In many such places, public emotions fluctuate between bitter impatience and indifferent skepticism - and neither impatience nor indifference are favorable atmospheres for encouraging reasoned thought.

We are raising students in America who are, by and large, historically illiterate.

The Internet is the single biggest creator of ignorance mankind has ever created, as well as the single biggest eliminator of that ignorance. It’s our ability to filter that eliminates the former and empowers the latter.

I wasn't weaned on the web nor coddled on a computer. Instead, I grew up in a highly centralized world where news and information were tightly controlled by a few editors, who deemed to tell us what we could and should know. My two young daughters, on the other hand, will be digital natives.

Americans are good people, and at times we can be wise. But we're often under-informed by media, misinformed by our government and ill-served by both.

The Internet is pushing us - in good ways and in bad - to realize that the official version of events shouldn't always be trusted or accepted without question.

There's an apparent freedom, an apparent liberty of access to everything, but you can't use it because it's too much. Everything is at the same level. You even have fake news. You have to go through fake news to make up your mind. Facts and lies are treated as equal. There are even people who are against the idea of climate change.

It's not as if Trump is addicted to the best-researched, most in-depth, meticulously sourced material in the world. If he were, we'd all be better off, right?