We can make the trains run on time but if they are not going where we want them to go, why bother?

Children are the living messages we send to a time we will not see. From a biological point of view it is inconceivable that any culture will forget that it needs to reproduce itself. But it is quite possible for a culture to exist without a social idea of children. Unlike infancy, childhood is a social artifact, not a biological category.

[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)

We are more naive than those of the Middle Ages, and more frightened, for we can be made to believe almost anything.

Certainty abolishes hope, and robs us of renewal.

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

The making of adaptable, curious, open, questioning people has nothing to do with vocational training and everything to do with humanistic and scientific studies.