Television Quotes

“How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.”
― David Foster Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

“We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.”
― Ray Bradbury

“The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.”
― Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things

“Call no man lucky until he is dead, but there have been moment of rare satisfaction in the often random and fragmented life of the radical freelance scribbler. I have lived to see Ronald Reagan called “a useful idiot for Kremlin propaganda” by his former idolators; to see the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union regarded with fear and suspicion by the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (which blacked out an interview with Miloš Forman broadcast live on Moscow TV); to see Mao Zedong relegated like a despot of antiquity. I have also had the extraordinary pleasure of revisiting countries—Greece, Spain, Zimbabwe, and others—that were dictatorships or colonies when first I saw them. Other mini-Reichs have melted like dew, often bringing exiled and imprisoned friends blinking modestly and honorably into the glare. E pur si muove—it still moves, all right.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Prepared for the Worst: Selected Essays and Minority Reports

“I feel guilty because for a long time I didn't allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon.”
― Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.”
― Jim Trelease, The Read-Aloud Handbook

“I was hungry when I left Pyongyang. I wasn't hungry just for a bookshop that sold books that weren't about Fat Man and Little Boy. I wasn't ravenous just for a newspaper that had no pictures of F.M. and L.B. I wasn't starving just for a TV program or a piece of music or theater or cinema that wasn't cultist and hero-worshiping. I was hungry. I got off the North Korean plane in Shenyang, one of the provincial capitals of Manchuria, and the airport buffet looked like a cornucopia. I fell on the food, only to find that I couldn't do it justice, because my stomach had shrunk. And as a foreign tourist in North Korea, under the care of vigilant minders who wanted me to see only the best, I had enjoyed the finest fare available.”
― Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty, and War: Journeys and Essays

“We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground...
Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.”
― Wes Jackson, Becoming Native to This Place

“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, Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left

“But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.”
― Kate Morton, The Forgotten Garden

“That day, I started taking an interest in the bar's television. We always kept it on. As the hours slid by in a cacophony of talk I kept watch, throwing in the occasional comment about politicians, bankers, show biz personalities as they appeared on screen. I wasn't being nosy, you understand. Just human.”
― Jonathan Gash, The Great California Game

“Audiences see personalities on shows interacting with wild animals as if they were not dangerous or, at the other extreme, provoking them to give viewers an adrenaline rush. Mostly, the animals just want to be left alone, so it’s not surprising that these entertainers are seriously hurt or even killed on rare occasions. On one level, it’s that very possibility the shows are selling.”
― Chris Palmer, Shooting in the Wild: An Insider's Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom

“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

“You don't talk; you watch talk shows. You don't play games; you watch game shows.

Travel, relationships, risk: Every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance, so that you can remain ever sheltered, ever passive, ever ravenous consumers who can't bring themselves to rise from their couches, break a sweat, and participate in life.”
― Brad Bird

“Robin, a mother really loves her children only if she loves them enough to let go. I didn't have children as annuities against loneliness in my old age. They were part of my youth—the wonderful thing I had with your father. Now they must have their youth and their children.”
― Jacqueline Susann, The Love Machine

“Producers increasingly insert overblown, hyper-emotional scenes even when the underlying conflict could be portrayed with calm or rational dialogue. The intent is not to model constructive problem-solving but to spike ratings through sudden bursts of emotional arousal. This strategy centers on eliciting raw, immediate reactions from the viewer with shows such as characters screaming, weeping dramatic waterfalls, or staging sudden betrayals.”
― E. Ravago, Bansang Pinipilas

“The antennae on his head look weird, I agree...but now I get Hulu and Netflix for free.”
― GLEN NESBITT

“Before the advent of HBO and Showtime, it wasn't so easy to make a TV character swear like a sailor, cowboy, or mobster.”
― Mark Peters, Yada, Yada, Doh!: 111 Television Words That Made the Leap from the Screen to Society

“What is friendship but a mutual respect with a smattering of envy.
Emma Beers Jones”
― Maria P Frino, Fame & Other Disasters

“Yesterday, I watched a grizzly swim across the Kane River at sunrise. I witnessed the sun igniting the golden fur behind his ears, a golden halo surrounding his mighty head. I felt humbled and awestruck at the power and grace of this majestic creature, consumed by the feeling that there are forces greater than we can ever know controlling this Earth. There are answers to questions that, for now, remain beyond our sight. I am hopeful that there are peaceful and beautiful possibilities for us all. I am hopeful that the beauty which I see in these lands has a power greater than the darkness. I am hopeful that in our darkest and most trying of days, this love will serve as a safe haven to guide us all out of the inferno of fear driving men to these black and brutal, lonely corners of Hell. I am hopeful that the great spirit of love will save us all.”
― Mark L. Smith

“I did not bring a television set out here with me, and I regret it sometimes when the evenings get long, but my idea was that living alone you can soon get stuck to those flickering images and to the chair you will sit on far into the night, and then time merely passes as you let others do the moving. I do not want that. I will keep myself company.”
― Per Petterson, Out Stealing Horses

“The mark of any good show is that you cannot remember it, no matter how much you yearn to. That from the very second the curtains close the whole thing slips through your fingers like grains of sand until all you’re left with, if you’re lucky, is the feeling. You should be struck by the sense that something”
― Bea Fitzgerald, Then Things Went Dark

“And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-
just-TV schticks, the circle back to the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic
postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.”
― David Foster Wallace, E Unibus Pluram

“Can I ask you to keep watching us? ... This is only the forty-eighth show. We've got more to reveal. We may have some surprises for you.”
― William Harrington, Columbo: The Grassy Knoll

“I miss those days of live television. There was that electric sense of excitement, of importance, when you sent that signal, at that very moment into people’s homes. That sense of urgency is diminished in the refinement of perfecting everything through multiple tapings until the talent and production crew get it right. Often during this process the original vitality is lost along with that sense of power, of instantly connecting with the audience”
― Ron Hull, Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television

“When asked, I told the board that public television should never be judged by the number of people who watch. That’s a competition we’ll never win, but rather, the measure is the impact our programming has on the people who do watch.”
― Ron Hull, Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television

“The images you see on television matter. They tell you about the world. They tell you who you are. What the world is like. They shape you. We all know this. There have been studies.”
― Shonda Rhimes, Year of Yes

“Nothing can content a fool, though television comes close.”
― Richard Ayoade, Afterthoughts: or Some Pistachios Won't Open – Wisdom for the Unreflective

“These are the last days
my television says. Tornadoes, more
rain, overcast, a chance

of sun but I do not
trust weathermen,
never have.”
― Kevin Young, For the Confederate Dead

“No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and instincts are to sell consumer goods.”
― Rod Serling, Submitted For Your Approval, Volume 1