Marya Mannes Quotes

I was raised by television. It was my first cultural window. It was a constant companion.

When I was a boy, there were three influences on children. The school, the family, and the church. Now there is a fourth---television.

Television is the third parent.

It takes a village to raise a child.

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.

The truth of television is that what people see, they believe.

Radio enables people to hear all evil, television enables them to see all evil, and the jet plane enables them to go off and do all evil.

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

The first 3 years of a person’s life determines the next 80 years.

Politicians used to be able to change the subject. With television they cannot do that any more.

Without television, Richard Nixon would not have a chance. He would not have a prayer of being elected because the press would not let him get through to the people.

First radio, then television, have assaulted and overturned the privacy of the home, the real American privacy, which permitted the development of a higher and more independent life within democratic society. Parents can no longer control the atmosphere of the home and have lost even the will to do so.

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.

When I was little, when I was a kid, I used to sit in front of the TV and just say what the TV says. It's how I got good at imitating people.

Television has been a powerful medium and it has been a huge part of my life at least 15 years.

TV is the most powerful medium, which has taken me right into the homes of so many people.

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

You see, the power of television cannot be underestimated.

Television has an unparalleled reach.

Television takes you to an altogether different audience and directly to people's living room. On television, I'm being myself, and that's why people relate to me more.

I think I got my education as a young boy from things I saw on TV.

Television can only destroy.

An extraterrestrial being, newly arrived on Earth - scrutinizing what we mainly present to our children in television, radio, movies, newspapers, magazines, the comics, and many books - might easily conclude that we are intent on teaching them murder, rape, cruelty, superstition, credulity, and consumerism. We keep at it, and through constant repetition many of them finally get it.

TV shapes thought as surely as language shapes it.

I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it.