Theresa Rebeck Quotes

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

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?

The impact of T.V. on our lives in general gets most things out of proportion.

Television is apparently the enemy of nuance. But nuance is essential for a thoughtful discussion.

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

Again, one of the problems I have with television, as I mentioned before, is it's trivial in many ways, and I think that a lot of folks out there are looking for new metaphors and new ways of thinking about things.

People used to laugh that academics would study Disney movies. There's nothing more important for academics to study, because they shape the minds of our children possibly more than any single thing.

The media, and how we're taught to read it, has a huge impact on who we become as people.

By giving students the proper tools to analyze the media they consume, we can empower them to make informed decisions.

Television has tremendous power over our lives.

How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? Television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable.

I think the problem with visual media like TV is that they're reductive.

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.

Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

TV serves us most usefully when presenting junk-entertainment; it serves us most ill when it co-opts serious modes of discourse - news, politics, science, education, commerce, religion.

I have a 6-year-old daughter, and we never look through magazines. But when we're on a plane, that's the one time we have screen-time and magazine-time sometimes. And I do not open a magazine with her without saying: 'Now remind me, are these real pictures?'

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

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

So many of our enormous emotional crises are lived through the media. They're lived through movies; they're lived through what we watch on television - they're not actual events in our life.

I don't know if I trust entertainment to teach anyone anything.

That's the power of television. You come into people's homes every week, and that creates a familiarity and a false sense of intimacy.

Films do have a very big impact on the youth, but the youth do have the quality to differentiate what is right and what is wrong!

It's more necessary than ever before to ensure that discernment and the development of a critical mind guide our take on the world and inform our relationship to the media and information.

As much as we try to deny it, media plays a huge part in how we view the world.

You often forget, because you're so inside it, that television has power.