“During the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live. If this state of affairs continues, we may alter an advertising slogan to read: LOOK NOW AND PAY LATER.
For surely we shall pay for using this most powerful instrument of communication to insulate the citizenry from the hard and demanding realities which must be faced if we are to survive. I mean the word survive literally.”

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

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Edward R. Murrow67

Television journalist 1908–1965

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“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

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Source: The German Ideology (1845-1846), Vol. I, Part 1.

“Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about fifty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there find recorded in black and white, or perhaps color, evidence of decadence, escapism and insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

“What many of us fail to realize is that the last four hundred years are a highly special period in the history of the world. The pace at which changes during these years have taken place is unexampled in earlier history, as is the very nature of these changes. This is partly the results of increased communication, but also of an increased mastery over nature, which on a limited planet like the earth, may prove in the long run to be an increased slavery to nature. For the more we get out of the world the less we leave, and in the long run we shall have to pay our debts at a time that may be very inconvenient for our own survival.”

Norbert Wiener book The Human Use of Human Beings

II. Progress and Entropy. p. 46
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“We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.”

Edward R. Murrow (1908–1965) Television journalist

RTNDA Convention Speech (1958)

“The survival of this country depends upon letting the world know we have the power and the ability to use it if the occasion demands.”

Forrest Sherman (1896–1951) Recipient of the Purple Heart medal

As quoted in "According to Plan" in TIME magazine (13 March 1950) http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,812125,00.html

“There are times when it is inappropriate to feel wholly good. Now is one of them. As the saying goes, "If you aren't angry, you aren't paying attention."
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Toward an Activist Spirituality (2003)

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Niels Bohr (1885–1962) Danish physicist

Quoted in Philosophy of Science Vol. 37 (1934), p. 157, and in The Truth of Science : Physical Theories and Reality (1997) by Roger Gerhard Newton, p. 176
Context: What is it that we humans depend on? We depend on our words... Our task is to communicate experience and ideas to others. We must strive continually to extend the scope of our description, but in such a way that our messages do not thereby lose their objective or unambiguous character … We are suspended in language in such a way that we cannot say what is up and what is down. The word "reality" is also a word, a word which we must learn to use correctly.

“Barbusse has shown us that the Outsider is a man who cannot live in the comfortable, insulated world of the bourgeois, accepting what he sees and touches as reality.”

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Source: The Outsider (1956), Chapter one, The Country of the Blind

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Clement Attlee (1883–1967) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Broadcast (3 March 1946), quoted in The Times (4 March 1946), p. 4
Prime Minister

“We must nurture and love, if life is to have any real meaning. But First we must find a way to survive against the things that prevent us from doing so.”

Terry Brooks (1944) American writer

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Edward R. Murrow67

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