Television Quotes

[W]hen a message is squeezed through a twenty-second news spot, so much can be lost that what is left will fail to move anyone enough to make them turn off the set and actually do something. Meanwhile, the viewers will believe that they have learned everything they need to know on that subject and will be bored the next time they hear it.

Jerry Mander

Television is the literature of the illiterate the culture of the low-brow the wealth of the poor the privilege of the underprivileged the exclusive club of the excluded masses.

Lee Loevinger

I can get a better grasp of what is going on in the world from one good Washington dinner party than from all the background information NBC piles on my desk.

Barbara Walters

When television is good nothing is better. But when television is bad nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your TV set and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

Newton Minow

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

Ann Landers

Television is a gold goose that lays scrambled eggs and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar.

Lee Loevinger

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Frank Lloyd Wright

In the age of television image becomes more important than substance.

S. J. Hayakawa

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.

Clive Barnes

Television has a real problem. They have no page two.

Art Buchwald

Good heavens television is something you appear on you don't watch.

Noël Coward

Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.

David Frost

Why should people pay good money to go out and see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?

Sam Goldwyn

The television commercial is the most efficient power-packed capsule of education that appears anywhere on TV.

C. L. Gray

Television is not the truth. Television is a god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus a carnival a travelling troupe of acrobats storytellers dancers singers jugglers sideshow freaks lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.

Paddy Chayefsky

Dictum on television scripts: We don't want it good - we want it Tuesday.

Dennis Norden

I've had several years in Hollywood and I still think the movie heroes are in the audience.

Wilson Mizner

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?

Nicholas Johnson

He who prides himself on giving what he thinks the public wants is often creating a fictitious demand for low standards which he will then satisfy.

Lord Reith

Of all the dramatic media radio is the most visual.

John Reeves

Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.

C. P. Scott

Television's compelling power is its immediacy . .. this immediacy feeds the politics of emotions gut reactions and impressions rather than the politics of logic facts and reason it emphasizes personality rather than issues.

Hedrick Smith

Interviews were invented to make journalism less passive. Instead of waiting for something to happen, journalists ask someone what should or could happen.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

By eroding their sense of shame we've made immorality normal, not only in the world but also in the forbidden squadron. ...their new Christian friends recommended some of the movies Fletcher had been wondering if he should now avoid. I was delighted one of them said, "This is a great movie--only one sex scene, and the f-word's only used a few times." 'Titanic' is one of my favorites. How many Christian young people have watched it in their own homes? Think of it, Squaltaint. Suppose someone in the youth group said to the boys, 'There's an attractive girl down the street. Let's get together and go look through her window and watch her undress and lay back on a couch and pose naked from the waist up. Then this girl and her boyfriend will get in a car and have sex--let's get as close as we can and listen to them and watch the windows steam up.' The strategy would never work. They'd know immediately it was wrong. But you can get them to do exactly the same thing by using a television instead of a window. That's all is takes! Think of it, Squaltaint. Every day Christians across the country, including many squadron leaders, watch women and men undress and commit acts of fornication and adultery the Enemy calls an abomination.We've made them a bunch of voyeurs! Churches full of peeping toms.

Randy Alcorn

TV stars are cool. Even if their characters are less than admirable, they come across as somehow sympathetic, maybe even neighborly. They are, after all, people you invite into your home every week. If you don't like them, you won't watch them.Movie stars, by contrast, are hot. They have to blaze so fiercely that they fill a screen forty feet high and demand the attention of a crowded theater.That's why very few TV stars have graduated successfully to features. It requires not only different skills but a different personality. You have to go from amiable to commanding.Likewise, some movie stars are simply too big for television. Jack Nicholson is riveting on-screen, but you wouldn't want him in your living room week after week. The television simply couldn't contain his personality.

Walter Jon Williams

Good film, television, or music keeps you awake, anxious for the next movement or act, and wanting more when it is finished.

John Grooters

I've tried to tell the truth. But I would say that, wouldn't I? In any case it has to be my truth. What other truth could I possibly know?

Tony Garnett

...and he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within.

Hubert Selby Jr.

Minimalism is a way of living at the maximum of your potential.

Anastasiya Kotelnikova

Texting and phone calls, fireworks, blends, café au lait, and music. Yesterday's television. Work and beer. The neighbor's dog, or those strange flowers, the way it smells at Maisen. Those ordinary things I talk about with you. With you... I want to talk about love with you.

Tomoko Yamashita

Watching too much TV can triple our hunger for more possessions, while reducing our personal contentment by about 5 percent for every hour a day we watch.

David Niven

A celebrity is an object that the media manufactures today, just so they have a subject tomorrow.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

Television isn't any longer the only way to fame, all you need is the internet to break into the game

Stanley Victor Paskavich

The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.

Christopher Hitchens

It is proper ‎Netiquette to watch television online via native ‎app when using ‪mobile.

David Chiles

If television's a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won't shut up.

Dorothy Gambrell

Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You're not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.

Seth Godin

He blamed television, movies, and books for his love of ghosts. It was a fascination that’s been with him since his youth. He always loved watching or reading anything that had to do with ghosts and haunted locations, especially historic sites like New Orleans, Salem, Tombstone, Gettysburg, and Old San Juan.

Jason Medina

I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' 'You're the television? Or someone in the television?' 'The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' 'What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow.'Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink.'You're a God?' said Shadow.Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said.

Neil Gaiman

With television, we vault ourselves into a continuous, incoherent present.

Neil Postman

Selling the presidency like cereal! How can you talk seriously about issues with half-minute spots?

Adlai Ewing Stevenson

Voting, we might even say, is the next to last refuge of the politically impotent. The last refuge is, of course, giving your opinion to a pollster, who will get a version of it through a desiccated question, and then will submerge it in a Niagara of similar opinions, and convert them into--what else?--another piece of news. Thus we have here a great loop of impotence: The news elicits from you a variety of opinions about which you can do nothing except to offer them as more news, about which you can do nothing.

Neil Postman

When you are the only laowai in a village of 10,000 Chinese martial artists and you've sat through several dozen films where a white man shouts, "You Chinese dog," before getting his ass kicked, it starts to irritate you. We all need role models.

Matthew Polly

A bad media creates a bad world and a good media makes the world good. The day all forms of media will stop functioning, we shall get a good understanding of the real meaning, value and impact of the media.

Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.

Neil Postman

If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.

Edward R. Murrow

We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business.

Edward R. Murrow

People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

Jess C. Scott

The television is 'real'. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn't time to protest, 'What nonsense!'.

Ray Bradbury

You should've thought of that before becoming a fir

Ray Bradbury

Television wasn't getting rid of animals, but they were no longer cast as creatures that were omniscient and heroic. They were talking horses like Mr Ed or an absurdist pig like Arnold Ziffle...Just like the heroic animals in silent films became comedians in talkies, animals on television were becoming jesters, something Rin Tin Tin had never been.

Susan Orlean

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.

Umberto Eco

There are many stories and accounts about the winners of lotteries whoare jubilant when they win, but whose lives descend into a nightmareafter acquiring that unearned money. (No challenge, no skill.) Thelottery looks like "the answer" to people because they associate moneywith pleasure. But the true enjoyment of money comes in part from theearning of it, which involves skill and challenge.Watching television is usually done for pleasure. That's why so fewpeople can remember (or make use of) any of the 30 hours of televisionthey have watched in the past week.

Steve Chandler

The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.

Neil Postman

If we really exist merely to fulfill God’s plan: then life is a television drama; with God being the scriptwriter, the director, and, the audience.

Mokokoma Mokhonoana

A fish tank is just interactive television for cats.

Oliver Gaspirtz

And yet that's the best way to watch television actively: with your eyes closed.

Jean-Philippe Toussaint

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.

Dan Harmon

All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.

Dan Harmon

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Television Quotes

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