Quotes about Television

“Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.”

“The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.”

“There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.”

“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn't there something reassuring about it! -- that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another's eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms -- nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”

“Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.”

“TV -- chewing gum for the eyes.”

“I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.”

“Let's face it, there are no plain women on television.”

“A three -- to four -- to five-hour experience with nothingness.”

“People assume you can't be shy and be on television. They're wrong.”

“TV is a fickle business. I'm only good for the length of my contract.”

“Television has brought back murder into the home -- where it belongs.”

“Television -- a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done.”

“The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle, they're on TV!”

“I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.”

“Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.”

“Performing doesn't turn me on. It's an egomaniac business, filled with prima donnas -- including this one.”

“Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.”

“Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.”

“Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.”

“I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on I go into another room and read a good book.”

“The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.”

“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.”

“Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. It strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.”

“Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your Living room by people you wouldn't have in your house.”

“Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.”

“If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on the Donahue show and Adolf Hitler on Meet the Press.”

“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.”

“We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.”

“What do a few lies on TV matter? They can be swallowed, digested and excreted, or follow people when they doze off to sink into oblivion.”