Television Quotes
Most popular television quotes
We don't think that televisions and personal computers are going to merge. We think basically you watch television to turn your brain off, and you work on your computer when you want to turn your brain on.
The routine promotion of condoms through advertising has been stopped by networks who are so hypocritically priggish that they refuse to describe disease control as they promote disease transmission.
Television is business, and business is America.
I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.
Television is best when it has something on its mind.
The medium is the message.
Television probably has become the most evocative, widely observed signpost we have.
All television is children's television.
If The Scarlet Letter took place in modern times, Hester and the Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale would appear on talk show after talk show until they had whetted themselves into a kind of telegenic sharpness.
All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?
[Television executives] are afraid to advertise condoms that could save lives, but do not blush about telecasting a National Geographic special on President Reagan's pelvic plumbing.
A viewer who skips the advertising is the moral equivalent of a shoplifter.
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.
When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.
Television should be kept in its proper place— beside us, before us, but never between us and the larger life.
Some television programs are so much chewing gum for the eyes.
Nothing is really real unless it happens on television.
The product is the delivery of the largest number of people at the least cost.
Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house.
The heightened public clamor resulting from radio and television coverage will inevitably result in prejudice. Trial by television is, therefore, foreign to our system.
When television is good, nothing — not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers — nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse.
Television is the first truly democratic culture - the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
All you have to do on television is be yourself, provided, that is, that you have a self to be.
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
I like to talk on TV about those things that aren't worth writing about.
The ultimate game show will be the one where somebody gets killed at the end.
Television is for appearing on, not looking at.
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.
People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.
TV—a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. However, it is our latest medium—we call it a medium because nothing's well done.
Television...is the first truly democratic culture, the first culture available to everyone and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
Television doomed us to the Family, whose household entertainment it has become—what the hearth used to be, flanked by the communal kettle.
The illusion of companionship sits waiting in the television set. We keep our televisions on more than we watch them—an average of more than seven hours a day. For background. For company.
Then I went in and shot the television, that insidious beast, that Medusa, which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
Entertainment without moral passion is television.
Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new type program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb as.
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it.
Television is not the truth. Television's a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.
The darkest spot in modern society is a luminous screen.
It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
When vaudeville died, television was the box they put it in.
Television is a weapon of mass distraction.
I wish all televisions would come with a warning from the Surgeon General: "Overuse of this medium may hinder the development of healthy interpersonal relationships, retard the growth of neural connections, diminish creativity, and foster poor family communication."
Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much if it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food.
We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
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. That's a far more depressing thought.
All television is educational television. The question is: What is it teaching?
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose—selling—that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.
TV has had a stronger impact on our society than any single invention since the automobile. It has put the dead hand on conversation and provided countless couples with an excuse for not discussing what's on their minds.
For all its flexibility, television is more a mirror of taste than a shaper of it.
Until a child can meet reality, he must live in fantasy. But he must create his own fantasy. And it is television's primary damage that it provides ten million children with the same fantasy, ready-made and on a platter.
In television, images are projected at you. You are the screen.
When television is good, nothing—not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers—nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
Television was not intended to make humans vacuous; but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
Public television ... the green vegetables of video viewing.
One can watch hours and hours of TV without actually losing interest, but, as with Chinese food, one is rarely left with much residue of nourishment.
How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper?
Ah, television! Teacher, mother, secret lover!
There will not be enough hours in 2015 to watch all the TV you want to see in 2015. It's not humanly possible. If you give each of your eyeballs its own screen, then wire another screen directly into your cortex for a third rail, you'd still run out of time.
I consider the television set as the American fireplace, around which the whole family will gather.
Ours is a society in which secrets of private life that, formerly, you would have given nearly anything to conceal, you now clamor to be invited on a television show to reveal.
There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment possibilities than the TV set.
I'm always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
What TV is extremely good at—and realize that this is all it does—is discerning what large numbers of people think they want, and supplying it.
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.
