Inga Muscio Quotes

I think that every time you bring a subject into the mainstream landscape of television, it can have a huge impact. Television is such an influential medium.

When television is good, nothing - not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers - nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite each of you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there for a day without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.

Nobody seems to know yet how television is going to affect the radio, movies, love, housekeeping or the church, but it has definitely revived vaudeville.

I recognize the unknowing, involuntary effect that 'Facts of Life' had and continues to have on several generations of people.

Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house.

Television is what made It's a Wonderful Life the classic it is today.

Television has done a lot for me, and I can never stay away from it.

Even when I started in 1970, I knew that television was having a negative effect on our society.

Reality TV rots people's brains.

Television and comic books are, and continue to be, probably the biggest influence in my life. It's the biggest influence on everybody's life.

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

I think it's terribly important to watch TV. I think there's a sort of minimum number of hours of TV a day you ought to watch, and unless you watch three or four hours of TV a day, you're just closing your eyes to some of the most important sort of stream of consciousness that's going on!

I was one of the first generations to watch television. TV exposes people to news, to information, to knowledge, to entertainment. How is it bad?

The power of television - it's so present in our lives, we don't even know how powerful it is.

The newspapers and magazines, the theaters and the social reform movements, are more and more made for a public which looks only to be entertained and which has lost the power of sustained attention.

Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television

Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

People get ideas of how to live or not to live from what you do on television.

With television, attention spans have been shortened. It's something we have to fight against: the dumbing down of the audience. To be part of an audience is a privilege. To be with the people on stage, to let them reach you. If you're doing a million other things, they won't reach you.

Sometimes you wonder if television is really affecting the culture.

I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go to the library and read a good book. ANOTHER VERSION I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. ANOTHER VERSION I find television very educational. Every time someone turns it on, I go in the other room and read a book.

People read every thing nowadays, except books.

The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading.

Black people watch more television than anybody else, which makes it legitimate to talk about television. Its anesthetizing effect has been quite real. But that concern isn't new.

When you read a book, you generate beta waves irrespective of the book's content. But if you look up from it, and start watching TV - it doesn't matter what the content of the program is - the beta waves disappear and you start processing alpha and theta waves. These are the same waves that you generate during meditation. Reading is primarily left hemisphere and watching television is primarily right hemisphere. Now how could that not have a major effect on our culture?