Quotes & Sayings About Television And Violence

American culture has regressed because of contemporary society's glorification of making a good living and spending free time in media activities rather than constantly devoting themselves to a learning and self-improvement. The combination of grooming youngsters to fit into a commercial workplace and Americans willingness to submit themselves to endless hours of watching television shows filled with murders, violence, sex, and replete with advertisements that promote the goods of commercial giants has eroded the American spirit and contributed to lack of an intellectually sophisticated populous. — Kilroy J. Oldster

I don't get you people. You watch the Godfather on television and tons of people are getting shot and stabbed to death, blood splattering everywhere and it is entertaining. But, when they killed a horse, people were outraged. — Mario Stinger

I think it is obvious that people repeat acts that are shown on the television or the screen and I wouldn't want to inspire any violence on anyone. — Mackenzie Astin

I think that, honestly, people's censorship issues are personal but I disagree with most of those personal choices that I see others make. I watch television and there's a grotesque amount of violence on almost every show. And I think my dirty brand of humor is far less destructive to a child's mentality. — Seth Rogen

Television and radio violence was considered by most experts of minimal importance as a contributory cause of youthful killing ... there were always enough experts to assure the public that crime and violence had nothing to do with crime and violence. — Marya Mannes

Contention, especially violence, is not the way to deal with our problems. Unfortunately, television, videos, movies, and electronic games teach otherwise. Even cartoons and many children's programs depict violence in amusing ways, suggesting that no one really gets hurt and that any disagreement can be solved by a karate kick or the use of some weapon. — Harold Anthony Oaks

I've been on the wrong end of violence, and I've done violence myself ... I refuse to glorify violence in my movie and television roles. — James Garner

Our media, which is like a planetary nervous system, are far more sensitive to breakdowns than to breakthroughs. They filter out our creativity and successes, considering them less newsworthy than violence, war, and dissent. When we read newspapers and watch television news, we feel closer to a death in the social body than to an awakening. — Barbara Marx Hubbard

A statement: children who watch violent TV programmes tend to be more violent when they grow up. But did the TV cause the violence, or do violent children preferentially enjoy watching violent programmes? Very likely both are true. Commercial defenders of TV violence argue that anyone can distinguish between television and reality. But Saturday morning children's programmes now average 25 acts of violence per hour. At the very least this desensitizes young children to aggression and random cruelty. And if impressionable adults can have false memories implanted in their brains, what are we implanting in our children when we expose them to some 100,000 acts of violence before they graduate from elementary school? — Carl Sagan

I think that people are going to find more interest in the human condition, especially with them being weaned on so much reality television. They want character driven stuff along with real violence. Cage fighting is very popular with the kids right now. They see and know what one punch can do to someone's face. You can't give someone five hundred punches in a film anymore. — Dolph Lundgren

The real danger wasn't violence like you saw on the television news, random and exciting - the real danger was the vampiric kind, the sort that you invited in because it told you everything you wanted to hear. Charles Manson could never have been Charles Manson if there hadn't been girls by the dozen, ready and willing, scarred by the silent cruelty behind those carefully locked doors. — Alison Umminger

As parents, can we counter the effect of television violence? One worrying feature in Britain is that so many TV sets are in a child's bedroom; this means that the mediating effect of watching with a parent, the ability to discuss and interpret what has been seen, is lost. — Robert Winston

In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we're in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and volunteer in our communities, as well as the future of our wildlands and wildlife. If the stories they create are misleading or false in some way, viewers will misunderstand the issues and react in inappropriate ways. People who consume a heavy diet of wildlife films filled with staged violence and aggression, for example, are likely to think about nature as a circus or a freak show. They certainly won't form the same positive connections to the natural world as people who watch more thoughtful, authentic, and conservation-oriented films. — Chris Palmer

There is the past and its continuing horrors: violence, war, prejudices against those who are different, outrageous monopolization of the good earth's wealth by a few, political power in the hands of liars and murderers, the building of prisons instead of schools, the poisoning of the press and the entire culture by money. It is easy to become discouraged observing this, especially since this is what the press and television insist that we look at, and nothing more. — Howard Zinn

Movies and television don't make you violent; all they do is channel the violence more creatively. — George Carlin

Violent video games played in public places are a tiny fraction of the media violence to which modern American children are exposed. Tiny - and judging from the record of this case not very violent compared to what is available to children on television and in movie theaters today. — Richard Posner

By the age of 18, the average child has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence, including 18,000 simulated murders, on television. It is not always easy to provide clear, consistent structure for children, but providing it often helps keep children safe and helps them grow to be responsible adults. — Jean Illsley Clarke

The racial problems that consumed Guitar were the most boring of all. He wondered what they would do if they didn't have black and white problems to talk about. Who would they be if they couldn't describe the insults, the violence, and oppression that their lives (and the television news) were made up of? If they didn't have Kennedy or Elijah to quarrel about? They excused themselves for everything. Every job of work undone, every bill unpaid, every illness, every death was The Man's fault. And Guitar was becoming just like them - except he made no excuse for himself - just agreed, it seemed to Milkman, with every grievance he heard. — Toni Morrison

Television programming for children need not be saccharine or insipid in order to give to violence its proper balance in the scheme of things ... But as an endless diet for the sake of excitement and sensation in stories whose plots are vehicles for killing and torture and little more, it is not healthy for young children. Unfamiliar as yet with the full story of human response, they are being misled when they are offered perversion before they have fully learned what is sound. — Dorothy H Cohen

Must we vampires always resort to violence so quickly? Could we not just all sit down over a "refreshing Bud Light" and "just chill," as my television and my teammates relentlessly urge me to do? — Beth Fantaskey

Even in the most peaceful communities, an appetite for violence shows up in dreams, fantasies, sports, play, literature, movies and television. And, so long as we don't transform into angels, violence and the threat of violence - as in punishment and deterrence - is needed to rein in our worst instincts. — Paul Bloom

Why do we have to have violence, torture, brutality in crime dramas every time we turn on television? Any new crime drama is going to have, sooner or later, a lot of torture and nasty things that make people flinch. Lots of young people I know shrink and flinch from that kind of thing on television, so I think showing it is a mistake. — Ruth Rendell

We often seem to be swimming through such a miasma of sexual violence - in advertising, television programming, heavy metal, rap, films, and worst of all, in the home - that even First Amendment absolutists sometimes daydream about how nice it would be to have government-as-nanny just outlaw all this effluent. — Molly Ivins

Indeed, Robert Jordan, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, noted in 2003: "We have noticed lately in influential mosques the imam has condemned terrorism and preached in favor of tolerance, then closed the sermon with 'O God, please destroy the Jews, the infidels, and all who support them.' "53 And while it was true that the Saudis managed to get Sheikh Ali bin al-Khudair, in late November 2003, to renounce his radical jihadi stance on prime-time Saudi television, 54 al-Khudair actually dealt largely with the doctrine of takfir - proclaiming Muslims to be infidels. His renunciation might help stop militant Muslim violence against other Muslims, but it simply did not address the problem of jihadi violence against Americans or others outside of Saudi Arabia. His statement seemed designed primarily to preclude attacks against the Saudi government and foreigners inside Saudi Arabia. — Dore Gold

But what you do sense, what is unmistakable, is a rising tide of frustration and anger and violence, born partly of the greater familiarity the poor today have with the rich, their faces pressed to that clear window on wealth afforded by ubiquitous television, and partly of the change in mentality that results from an outward shift in the supply curve for firearms. — Mohsin Hamid

New Rule: The White House doesn't have to release the dead Bin Laden photos, but don't pretend we can't take it. We've seen pictures of Britney Spears's vagina getting out of a car. Television has desensitizes us to violence, and porn has desensitized us to people getting shot in the eye. — Bill Maher

Through TV people turn their family living rooms into meditative dens of death and violence worship. — Bryant McGill

In the mainstream film market, certainly in television, sex is handled fairly discreetly. I think the abuse of extraordinarily graphic violence and language presses much closer to the tolerance of public taste. — Charlton Heston

Another activity that can detract us from the proper way is watching television excessively or viewing improper movies. While fine productions on these media are uplifting and entertaining, we need to be very selective in choosing what we see and how much of our time such an activity deserves. Our precious time must not be diverted to the sideline attractions of vulgar language, immoral conduct, pornography, and violence. — Joseph B. Wirthlin

I was stricken by news and television pictures coming from the United States this morning. It is impossible to fully comprehend the evil that would have conjured up such a cowardly and depraved assault upon thousands of innocent people. There can be no cause or grievance that could ever justify such unspeakable violence. Indeed, such an attack is an assault not only on the targets but an offense against the freedom and rights of all civilized nations. — Jean Chretien

Violence is interesting. This is a great obstacle to world peace and also to more thoughtful television programming. — P. J. O'Rourke

Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives. — Bell Hooks

Nothing gets us down more than watching violence on television or reading about war and brutality in the newspaper. The truth is, there's a massive reduction in the amount of violence around the world. — Peter Diamandis

Television is full of fictional and real violence that's turned into entertainment. — Bill James

He's like everybody else in television. And Hollywood. And Broadway. He thinks everything sentimental is tender, everything brutal is a slice of realism and that everything that runs into physical violence is a legitimate climax to something that isn't even- — J.D. Salinger

The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The "death play" of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels. — Richard J. Borden

When people see the terrible scenes of violence on television, when we mourn the death of each and every American man and woman in uniform or a civilian that's killed, that it's hard to see the progress that's being made and it's hard to believe that this is all going to come out for the better. — Condoleezza Rice

By ... our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing ... we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes. — Martin Luther King Jr.

The problem with our society is that our values aren't in the right place. There's an awful lot of bleeding and naked bodies on prime-time networks, but not nearly enough cable television on public programming. — Bauvard

The Gross National Product includes the destruction of the redwoods and the death of Lake Superior. It grows with the production of napalm and missiles and nuclear warheads ... It includes ... the broadcasting of television programs which glorify violence to sell goods to our children. — Robert Kennedy

The television screen is the lens through which most children learn about violence. Through the magnifying power of this lens, their everyday life becomes suffused by images of shootings, family violence, gang warfare, kidnappings, and everything else that contributes to violence in our society. It shapes their experiences long before they have had the opportunity to consent to such shaping or developed the ability to cope adequately with this knowledge. — Sissela Bok

Television is perhaps the greatest medium ever discovered to teach and educate and even to entertain. But the filth, the rot, the violence, and the profanity that spew from television screens into our homes is deplorable. It is a sad commentary on our society. The fact that a television set is on six or seven hours every day in most of the homes of America says something of tremendous importance. — Gordon B. Hinckley

Violence and smut are of course everywhere on the airwaves. You cannot turn on your television without seeing them, although sometimes you have to hunt around. — Dave Barry

Television thus illustrates the mixed blessings of technological change in American society. It is a new medium, promising extraordinary benefits: great educational potential, a broadening of experience, enrichment of daily life, entertainment for all. But it teaches children the uses of violence, offers material consumption as the answer to life's problems, sells harmful products, habituates viewers to constant stimulation, and undermines family interaction and other forms of learning such as play and reading. — Kenneth Keniston

TV is a pornographic cacophony of violence, death obsession, screams, gunfire and drama. You think it's fine because you are damaged. — Bryant McGill