Daphne Guinness Quotes

I don't read the press, I don't watch endless music TV.

I was a victim of what most people are a victim of, which is really, really just gulping down what was being fed to me by the media.

Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.

The public read newspapers, see television, they watch, they don't know if it's true or false because they're not involved.

I blame the newspapers because every day they call our attention to insignificant things, while three or four times in our lives,we read books that contain essential things. Once we feverishly tear the band of paper enclosing our newspapers, things should change and we should find--I do not know--the Pensées by Pascal!

Television tells us only the things it wants to. It still feeds us heroes, it still offers villains. And even though we know better than to always trust it, we still watch.

It is the mission of the press to disseminate intellect and at the same time destroy receptivity to it.

Speed as a drug disorganizes the personality; speed as the goal of information dissemination commits a subtler crime. People are mainlining our words. We rarely read of the rational alternatives, only of the commands that all must change or else. This is a prescription for public panic.

A big part of my book deals with the caliber of journalism. Our journalism in general is deplorable, and on elections in particular it's very ineffectual. There are a lot of problems, a lot of them having to do with to problems within the professional code of journalism, which defines its role as the regurgitation of what people in power say. Another big problem is that we allow people with money to basically buy what's talked about in campaigns through running TV ads.

Everybody just lets the media do their thinking for them... that's why you'll never hear any reggae on the radio!

I have a theory that the Internet makes people stupider. And Also FOX News makes people stupider.

The second suggestion is to think as well as to read. I know people who read and read, and for all the good it does them they might just as well cut bread-and-butter. They take to reading as better men take to drink. They fly through the shires of literature on a motor-car, their sole object being motion. They will tell you how many books they have read in a year. Unless you give at least 45 minutes to careful, fatiguing reflection (it is an awful bore at first) upon what you are reading, your 90 minutes of a night are chiefly wasted.

All media can muddy the mind. Language leads to literature. It also leads to dogma.

I am ill at ease with people whose lives are an open book.

For the newspaper is in all literalness the bible of democracy, the book out of which a people determines its conduct. It is the only serious book most people read. It is the only book they read every day.

We live in an age of rapid mass media, television, Internet. They determine our tempo, not books.

The book [Manufacturing Consent] itself is then devoted to a series of case studies, selected, we hope [with Edward Herman], to offer a fair and in fact rather severe test of those conclusions.

What we are fed through the media I do not accept, unless you see it with your own eyes you cant trust anything.

Of course the media loves stuff like that so they find this one Rockette. It's like you can have 10,000 people at a rally for [Donald] Trump and 200 people outside, and the 200 people outside make the news.

Few people ask from books what books can give us. Most commonly we come to books with blurred and divided minds, asking of fiction that it shall be true, of poetry that it shall be false, of biography that it shall be flattering, of history that it shall enforce our own prejudices. If we could banish all such preconceptions when we read, that would be an admirable beginning.

We are the shadow cast by real people. And that shadow changes shape as the news cycle changes shape, so you always have fresh dirt to dig in.

Magazines, books, novels, TV, internet, movies - all of those things is what creates our consciousness.

We set ourselves up for it with the reality show. You've seen me and Nick go at each other's throats on TV. They've got all these people giving their opinions on our marriage and how we handle it when they are watching an edited TV show.

I gave up on America. I read the Times just to find out what they're thinking. I read blogs. I get most of my best information from people who are there, people who write independently. And there's actually very few of them.

There is too much talk and gossip; pictures are apparently made, like stock-market prices, by competition of people eager for profits... All this traffic sharpens our intelligence and falsifies our judgment.