Newton N. Minow Quotes

All kinds of violence on the TV. You're not supposed to watch violence on the TV. Children, they can't watch it 'cause they're afraid maybe the kids will copy something they see on the TV. I can't even get a funny cartoon anymore because some 12-year-old somewhere watched a particularly violent episode of the Road Runner-Coyote show, and the next day, they found him at the bottom of a canyon, two giant springs strapped to his feet.

Children from the age of five to ten should watch more television. Television depicts adults as rotten SOB's given to fistfights, gunplay, and other mayhem. Kids who believe this about grownups aren't likely to argue about bedtime.

The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.

I don't think that growing up in the entertainment industry is the healthiest place for kids. The track record kind of shows that.

What interests me is what children go through while growing up.

There is a psychic cost children bear when they grow up in fear.

Childhood is just this amazing place, and in my books, I was trying to express my concern about childhood being eroded. You have kids' TV programs being interrupted by terrorist attacks, and kids are exposed to so much these days.

Let’s get real. It does make a difference what children see on television.

Kids are generally rotten until the age of about six, when they become people.

If we could have seen through the televisions, we would probably have seen many a child grow up.

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

Child. That was a terrible thing to say to anyone who was almost thirteen.

It is only grown-ups who want children to be children; children themselves always want to be real people.

The first step to get this noble and manly steadiness, is... carefully keep children from frights of all kinds, when they are young. ...Instances of such who in a weak timorous mind, have borne, all their whole lives through, the effects of a fright when they were young, are every where to be seen, and therefore as much as may be to be prevented.

Children have a right to grow up in a family with a father and a mother.

I'd like to know why sociologists can't decide whether movie sex and violence has any effect on children, but there's a universal consensus that even a glimpse of a Camel will force children to become lifelong smokers.

Television deprives children of their imaginations.

No child is born a delinquent. They only became that way if nobody loved them when they were kids. Unloved children grow up to be serial murderers or alcoholics.

All parents damage their children. It cannot be helped.

Of some forty families I have been able to observe, I know hardly four in which the parents do not act in such a way that nothing would be more desirable for the child than to escape their influence.

Little children, from the moment in which they are weaned, are making their way toward independence.

It always grieves me to contemplate the initiation of children into the ways of life when they are scarcely more than infants. It checks their confidence and simplicity, two of the best qualities that heaven gives them, and demands that they share our sorrows before they are capable of entering into our enjoyments.

There are children born to be children, and others who must mark time till they can take their natural places as adults.