Newton N. Minow Quotes

Sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

Television is a powerful medium that has to be used for something better than sitcoms and police shows. On the other hand, if you don't recognize the forces that play on what people watch and what they don't then you're a fool and you should be in a different business.

I would like television to produce some itching pills rather than this endless outpouring of tranquilizers.

Television leaves no external scars.

If you feel so strongly about what's on television, don't have one.

They call television a medium because nothing's well done.

Television in the 1960s & 70s had just as much dross and the programmes were a lot more tediously patronising than they are now. Memory truncates occasional gems into a glittering skein of brilliance. More television, more channels means more good television and, of course, more bad. The same equation applies to publishing, film and, I expect, sumo wrestling.

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

Savvy observers occasionally note television's resemblance to the weather: Everybody loves to complain about it, but nobody can do anything to fix it.

Let's be real: It's just TV; it's just entertainment.

I seriously consider television to be the people's medium.

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

I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it.

There's not a lot of light on television.

I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air . . . and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a great wasteland.

With TV, the most important thing is just to get people to turn it on.

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

If everything on television is, without exception, part of a low-calorie (or even no-calorie) diet, then what good is it complaining about the adverts? By their worthlessness, they at least help to make the programmes around them seem of a higher level.

The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

When television producers say it is the parents obligation to keep children away from the tube, they reach the self satire point of warning that their own product is unsuitable for consumption

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.

One of the networks sent me a TV set to watch. I didn't care for the medium. It depressed me.

The problem is, there are definitely some genuinely lame things on television, and there's more at the bottom of the barrel, because the barrel in a sense has gotten bigger.

Television has tremendous power over our lives.