Cultural Programming Quotes

Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education.

If I had money, I would like to get an old building, have music performances, do lithographs, have shows of paintings, and do those things that I'm interested in doing.

When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.

Don't let anyone turn you into a slave. You're a slave if you let the media tell you that sports and entertainment are more important than developing your brain.

Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.

I do think the BBC could do more, but I've always thought the BBC could do more - I think there should be more arts programmes full stop.

Anything seen on TV is, in a subtle and sinister sense, thereby endorsed.

Human society as a whole is a vast brainwashing machine whose semantic rules and sex roles create a social robot.

All media exist to invest our lives with artificial perceptions and arbitrary values

The BBC is very aware of its role in shaping people's consciousness… it's manipulative and deeply political.

Culture has worked by coming to exercise a form of mind control over us. We willingly accept and even embrace this mind control, and probably without even knowing it.

I do not want to be a robot, a cog in society who answers 'yes' because 'yes' is considered the appropriate answer. Neither do I want to be a protestor. I just want to seek out what lies underneath the veils of politeness and programming that I've been given as a person in this society.

Years of cultural programming have taught us to love some animals while eating others, when in all reality, all animals are sentient beings with the capacity to feel, both physically and emotionally.

Conservatives always knew that the Left made a concerted effort to dominate in the entertainment field because it's such a fabulous way to plant the seed of an agenda. Sugar helps the medicine go down, as does seeing it on the silver screen or hearing it in a catchy pop hook.

I think the Norweigan model of municipalities owning cinemas and being programmed by people who know about films is a good one.

You can binge a TV series or watch a reality show, and they're not innocent. They take a lot of room in your brain, and you don't have any space left for your own thoughts. They give you a scripted reality. It's an ideological tool.

We are born into a world in which sexual possibilities are narrowly circumscribed. . . . We are programmed by the culture as surely as rats are programmed to make the arduous way through the scientist's maze, and that programming operates on every level of choice and action.

Everyone in the world was programmed by the place they were born, hemmed in by their beliefs, but you had to at least try to grow your own brain.

It might be hard to remember this far back, but once upon a time, some of us hoped that public TV would develop into a smart, sophisticated, civilized alternative to commercial TV - not a cheap imitation of it.

Want to talk third-wave feminism, you could cite Ariel Levy and the idea that women have internalized male oppression. Going to spring break at Fort Lauderdale, getting drunk, and flashing your breasts isn't an act of personal empowerment. It's you, so fashioned and programmed by the construct of patriarchal society that you no longer know what's best for yourself. A damsel too dumb to even know she's in distress.

I feel like I think like a woman because I grew up with my mother and my sister, so I've just been programmed to think like a girl.

We live in a media soup and are constantly being programmed or are fighting that programming. Thus any truthful account of a life, every part of a life, is about society as well as an individual.

I've been cheered by the reaction to what I've done with Film Independent at LACMA and the organizational support I've received in pursuing it.

We seldom realize, for example that our most private thoughts and emotions are not actually our own. For we think in terms of languages and images which we did not invent, but which were given to us by our society.

People don't like the music that's out now, that's on their radio stations, and they want to hear something different, but they're just the audience. You know, people will keep the TV on even if a show is on that they hate - because, unfortunately, they've been programmed to do that. [But] they are really looking for something that's gonna speak to the world that they're living in. That's what people are looking for, but they're not finding it.