"Television has tremendous power over our lives"
About this Quote
The intent is cautionary, but not puritanical. “Tremendous” isn’t a moral verdict; it’s a scale warning. Television’s power is emotional and ambient: it sets the national mood, normalizes what counts as success, and turns politics into character drama. The subtext is that we don’t merely watch TV; we absorb its rhythms until it starts to script our expectations - of family life, of patriotism, of what a “credible” person looks like when speaking. If you’ve ever felt a story become “real” only after it appeared on the evening news, you’ve already lived inside her premise.
Context matters: Eisenhower comes out of an era when television became the dominant public square, compressing complex events (war, scandal, protest) into segments designed to hold attention between commercials. That’s the quiet bite of the line: television’s influence isn’t only in what it shows, but in what it makes unshowable - nuance, privacy, and slow truth.
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Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Eisenhower, Julie Nixon. (2026, January 15). Television has tremendous power over our lives. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/television-has-tremendous-power-over-our-lives-112667/
Chicago Style
Eisenhower, Julie Nixon. "Television has tremendous power over our lives." FixQuotes. January 15, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/television-has-tremendous-power-over-our-lives-112667/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Television has tremendous power over our lives." FixQuotes, 15 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/television-has-tremendous-power-over-our-lives-112667/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.







