Noreena Hertz Quotes

The entertainment industry has an effect on social consciousness.

There is a tendency around the world today to copy TV culture. And that is not always a virtue.

Hollywood likes to boast that it can elevate the national conscience.

'The Cosby Show' changed America's opinion on so many different topics and opened so many people's eyes, and so you really learned immediately the power of what you were doing, that there was a power in portraying a role, and you were made aware of the effect that it could have on people, so it does raise the bar.

We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based.

As a teenager I read a lot of books. Books with lots of scary trends, things like nuclear weapons and overpopulation and global diseases, and I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great to write stories that showed people these problems and that we could do something about them.'

In 1986, human nature in America started to change. That year, 'The Oprah Winfrey Show,' based in Chicago, became nationally syndicated, and the country entered the beginning stages of a quiet cultural revolution.

I don't write for any group. I write to bring about a change in consciousness.

We talk about the influence of the media on public opinion. But reality has some influence on public opinion too.

If the rest of the world aspires to our way of life ... we'll bury ourselves in waste.

The fact that television is raising our moral conscience is a good thing.

People are getting richer all over the world and they are going to want to live the way Americans live. And that is going to place a big strain on our environment and will be a great challenge.

We have ended the dreaded Communism, we must now end the dreaded capitalism.... We have to use less. Cutting our consumption by 75% is a very reasonable and relatively easily obtainable goal.

It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation-states, however powerful. It is a principle which will yield only slowly and reluctantly to the imperatives of global environmental cooperation.

The press is new and certainly a powerful agent in human affairs. It will change societies; but it is difficult to conceive how, by rendering men indocile and presumptuous, it can change them for the better.... It has inspired ignorance with presumption, so that those who cannot be governed by reason are no longer awed by authority.

At a time when India is going through great changes and, with China, is likely to inherit the world from the West, it is important that writers like me try to highlight the brutal injustices of Indian society. That's what I'm trying to do – it is not an attack on the country, it's about the greater process of self-examination.

To change our laws and culture, the green movement must attract and include the majority of all people, not just the majority of affluent people

It really is true that when an issue becomes pop culture, it changes faster, and it's really great for the issue.

There is so much going on in our country and in the world today... We're getting the headlines for a second, shaped by corporate delivery most of the time, but what's really the story there? Well, I'm turned on by that kind of stuff.

In the past, modeling influences were largely confined to the styles of behavior and social practices in one's immediate community. The advent of television vastly expanded the range of models to which members of society are exposed day in and day out.

Halloween is woke, and there's nothing we can do about it.

The goal must be to expand ourselves beyond one field of focus and use our improved access to information to solve the very real and extreme economic, environmental, and resource challenges we face as an interconnected, global society.

The trends that are shaping the twenty-first-century world embody both promise and peril. Globalization, for example, has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty while contributing to social fragmentation and a massive increase in inequality, not to mention serious environmental damage.

I used to sort of consider myself a feminist, an environmentalist, and I still have some of that in me, but I've done so many offensive comedies, I'm now worn down to a little nub of... nub of an activist.

The Impact Channel and OurPlanet were created to increase awareness of environmental and social causes within the MySpace community.