Ruth Westheimer Quotes

I'm not particularly interested in my phone. I'm interested in human contact. I think phones have created a certain social incapacity; it's made people socially deficient.

I think there's a fear of disconnect sometimes; communication is a huge issue for all of us, from adults to kids, as far as our face-to-face time and our ability to interact with each other without isolating itself to a phone. I think that has to be something that's very challenging.

We go into restaurants, and people aren't talking anymore. They're texting. While they are sitting at a restaurant with each other. So we're losing this intimacy that we need to have as human beings.

I hope they're reminded that joy is very easy to access if you just put down your phone, look at another person, and make a human connection. You'll find a new experience that you wouldn't have had otherwise.

I don't exclusively talk to people on social media; I don't meet people through Tinder. I try to keep it face-to-face, and to be aware if my phone is sucking me away from the rest of the world.

When you're at dinner with somebody and they are on their phone. I think there's that lost art of conversation and so I just always try to keep my phone far away from me when I'm with people.

My fundamental belief is, if you’re looking at your phone more than into someone’s eyes, that’s a problem.

With technology, there is so much isolation with people now, that there are very few places where you can connect.

I am the first to admit my iPad is the coolest thing in the world, but when we can be in a room together and really connect, or leave the gadgets home and go for a hike, then I'm happy.

I go to dinner with my friends, and we're like, 'Let's put our phones on airplane mode so we can really enjoy each other's company.'

I have a grandson who is 20. He's a computer guy. I'm worried that he can't communicate without his machine. They have no personal contact with people. That's the bad part of technology.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

In today's world, everyone's so clued into their iPhones, and communication is going by the wayside as far as one-on-one is concerned. It's very seldom that I walk into a room and parents make their children say hello and have a social grace with one another.

You look out on the street, and everyone has their heads in their phones. Nobody's really looking up at the sky or the buildings and taking the day in. I try to be conscious of it, but everybody falls prey to it.

In every public space, everyone has their head down on their phone. Including me.

Habitual texters may not only cheat their existing relationships, they can also limit their ability to form future ones since they don't get to practice the art of interpreting nonverbal visual cues.

The principal contributor to loneliness in this country is television. What happens is that the family 'gets together' alone.

I've never seen anything like the way some young people behave. They go out on a date, and they're sitting opposite each other at a table, and they're not looking at each other, and they text each other as though they're deaf-mutes. It's insane.

We're getting so pulled in by computers and technology, and our kids have their face in the computers all day. The human relationship is being diminished by this.

I'm very tech-forward. However, I also think hitting the pause button is not a bad thing, and really connecting with people one-to-one viscerally, having a connection with someone, is really important.

People live too much of their lives on email or the Internet or text messages these days. We're losing all of our communication skills.

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

We have lost the art of conversation. People are shy and don't know how to approach other people, and they are missing opportunities for relationships. And no one's entertaining at home anymore. They're not having people over for dinner.

I think that we're reducing who we are as human beings to these cell phones and these devices; now we don't even want to pick up a telephone to talk - we just text.

The idea of just sitting at home on Facebook worries me. I think we should all get out more.