“electronic media have become an environment of their own- to the list of neighborhood and region and continent and planet we must now add television as a place where we live. and the problem is not that it exists- the problem is that it supplants. it's simplicity makes complexity hard to fathom.”

“money supplants skill; it's possession allows us to become happily stupid.”

“we have developed a series of emotional thermostats as well, by far the most potent of which is television itself. instead of really experiencing the highs and lows, pains and joys, that make up a life, many of us use TV just as we use central heating- to flatten our variations, to maintain a constant "optimal" temperature.”

“increasingly we live in a world filled with the equivalents of deadly garage-door openers, unnecessary items that offer us mild and insipid comfort at the price of a dangerous and uncomfortable planet, and at the price of any real relationship to the physical world. if you live in a suburban home and commute to a parking garage somewhere, that ten seconds of opening the garage door(manually) might be nearly the only rain you ever feel.”

“TV, and the culture it anchors, masks and drowns out the subtle and vital information contact with the real world once provided. There are lessons, enormous lessons, lessons that may be crucial to the planet's persistence as a green and diverse place and also to the happiness of it's inhabitants-that nature teaches and TV can't.”

“I think people who don't know the woods very well sometimes imagine it as a kind of undifferentiated mass of greenery, an endless continuation of the wall of trees they see lining the road. And I think they wonder how it could hold anyone's interest for very long, being all so much the same. But in truth I have a list of a hundred places in my own town I haven't been yet. Quaking bogs to walk on; ponds I've never seen in the fall (I've seen them in the summer - but that's a different pond). That list gets longer every year, the more I learn, and doubtless it will grow until the day I die. So many glades; so little time.”

“the television culture celebrates incompetence.”