Edwin Newman Quotes

Learn what the rest of the world is like. The variety is worthwhile.

Speaking more than one language and living in a multicultural family and environment did not seem like anything but what it was: the world I lived in.

What images do we see from the rest of the world? We see natural disasters, war, terror. We see refugees, and we see horrible diseases. Right? We see beautiful beaches, cute animals, beautiful nature, cultural rites and stuff. And then we're supposed to make the connection in our head and create a worldview out of this. And how is that possible?

The States are great. I'd like to go just to see life, see things and hear people talk. It's like a circus where different acts go on at the same time.

America is not the world.

I think Americans suffer for their lack of travel, awareness of the world. It has horribly warped our sense of place in the scheme of things.

I've lived many places all over the world, so I've always seen myself as a citizen of the world.

Be patient, for the world is broad and wide.

The best American is one who considers themselves as a citizen of the world.

You can have a lot of New York and still see what's going on in the rest of the world, I think - like in China.

May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it.

One of the things I tend to do is open myself up to a variety of voices. I try to expose myself to the kind of culture shock that occurs when you talk to people who speak a different language.

Wars might come and go, but the seven o'clock news lives forever.

When in August 1793 a British delegation showed their hosts a terrestrial globe, it turned into a diplomatic incident, for the Chinese were furious to see that their empire covered so little of it. For centuries the Chinese had thought of themselves as 'The Middle Kingdom', that is the centre of the civilized world. To see otherwise was a shock.

One of the interesting things about Los Angeles is that it's still supplying the whole of the world with its dreams through movies and songs and TV - often of an all-American family at the same time as the real Los Angeles is peopled by souls from Vietnam, Guatemala, and Korea who look nothing like the images being beamed out. I think all that is going to have to change and illusion is going to have to catch up with reality in that regard.

Sometimes when you're relegated to your neighborhood, you forget that there's more important things than your neighborhood going on out in the world. And that just gave me a chance to see how life could be. And it gave me a chance to interact with everybody, not just black people or Mexicans. It made me just a little more worldly.

With my family, I'm trying to raise them to have respect for all people and make friends around the world and feel at home with the world and really live a truly global life because I think it's what forms them and it's really important to me.

I thought the whole world was like Lorain.

Television as we have it isn't an art form - it's a piece of furniture that is good for a few things.

I know the whole world is watching now. And I wish the world could see what I can see. Sometimes you have to get up really high to understand how small you really are. I'm going home now.

For most people, there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.

If you go get a passport, it might encourage you to at least consider the world around you.

I think I'm better wired for television. I love variety as far as a project. I'm easily bored and the schedule of a television show, it just keeps you going. I love theater and I think doing a sitcom in front of a live audience is the closest you can get to theater, and it's really the best mix of like standup and theater, is really a sitcom. I started as a standup and I still continue to do that as well, so I think I'm just a TV guy and happy for it. I think my movie career is kind of like my social life, I'm picky and not in demand. So it perhaps is working out.

I think it's good that you test the reality that surrounds you in your neighbourhood with the reality as it is in other parts of the world; you come up with a better judgment. I'm not meaning that literally you can only do that and not go to school at all but in terms of enrichment of a personality I think it's a fabulous thing.

[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)