Television Quotes

“The problem with most of us is that we relinquish that little bit of control that we have over our thoughts.We let our minds feed on whatever we come across on television and in social media, and do not pay any attention to the type of information that we are swallowing.”
― Dr Prem Jagyasi

“Distractions can make a day feel like an hour.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“What about television?" a young man asked.

"It's an octopus. It's no longer just a little box, it's the Love Machine."

"Why the Love Machine?" a reporter asked.

"Because it sells love. It creates love. Presidents are chosen by their appeal on that little box. It's turned politicians into movie stars and movie stars into politicians. It can you engaged if you use a certain mouthwash. It claims you'll have women hanging on your coattails if you use a certain hair cream. It tells the kids to eat their cereal if they want to be like their baseball idol. But like all great lovers, the Love Machine is a fickle bastard. It has great magnetism--but it has no heart. In place of a heart beats a Nielsen rating. And when the Nielsen falters, the program dies. It's the pulse and heart of the twentieth century--The Love Machine.”
― Jacqueline Susann, The Love Machine

“Apparently advertisers don't like clever or insightful television programmes because such fare encourages people to discuss what they've seen during the ad breaks. This would explain much about the current state of broadcasting.”
― Sandi Toksvig, The Chain of Curiosity

“One reason television is such a perilous medium is that even infants less than two years old imitate what they see on the screen, yet what appears there is determined by what happens to appeal or to sell rather than by what behavior helped individuals in a particular past environment to survive or prosper.”
― Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species

“If your face is being illuminated by your television or computer screen, then you should increase the illumination in your environment by moving closer to the window or by using filament light bulbs.”
― Steven Magee

“If a Writer births the baby, then a Producer raises the child and sends it off to school.”
― Rona Edwards, I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development from the Inside Out”
― Rona Edwards, I Liked It, Didn't Love It: Screenplay Development from the Inside Out

“Junk food is television for tongues.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“If your priority is a cinema experience in your own home then you should buy a large screen television, if it is good sleep and health then you should buy a small screen television.”
― Steven Magee

“The brevity of our lives makes watching TV seem like a symptom of insanity.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Previously, leaving the couch and walking up to the television to change the channel might cost more effort than merely enduring the awful advertisement and associated anxiety. But with a remote in hand, the viewer can click a button and move away effortlessly. Add cable television and the ability to change channels without returning the set (not to mention hundreds of channels to watch instead of just three), and the audience's orientation to the program has utterly changed. The child armed with the remote control is no longer watching a television program, but watching television—moving away from anxiety states and into more pleasurable ones.

Take note of yourself as you operate a remote control. You don't click the channel button because you are bored, but because you are mad: Someone you don't trust is attempting to make you anxious. You understand that it is an advertiser trying to make you feel bad about your hair (or lack of it), your relationship, or your current SSRI medication, and you click away in anger. Or you simply refuse to be dragged still further into a comedy or drama when the protagonist makes just too many poor decisions. Your tolerance for his complications goes down as your ability to escape becomes increasingly easy. And so today's television viewer moves from show to show, capturing important moments on the fly. Surf away from the science fiction show's long commercial break to catch the end of a basketball game's second quarter, make it over to the first important murder on the cop show, and then back to the science fiction show before the aliens show up.”
― Douglas Rushkoff, Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

“Kama kuna jambo la muhimu unapaswa kufanya kwa ajili ya kadari ya maisha yako na kipindi hichohicho kuna kipindi kizuri cha televisheni unakisubiria, au simu ya umbea, au kinanda cha shida, palilia bustani yako ya kiroho kwa kuachana na televisheni na simu na kufanya jambo la msingi kwa ajili ya maisha yako.”
― Enock Maregesi

“Real life is not like what you see on TV.”
― Bryant A. Loney, Sea Breeze Academy

“I call modern large screen televisions “Insomnia TV’s” because they are known to disrupt sleep.”
― Steven Magee

“الفرق بين الرديو والتليفزيون هو أن الراديو سيدة محجبة تخاطبك بلباقة، ولا تراها ...
أما التليفزيون فإنه سيدة تحررت من الحجاب وهى تتحدث إليك بلباقة ورشاقة، وإذا لم تقنعك لباقتها ... أقنعتك رشاقتها !”
― كامل الشناوي, ساعات

“I don’t really do anything. It’s kinda fun sometimes”
― Jay Cutler

“Mass media programmers know that the best way to capture audience share is to titillate the masses with conflict, violence, sex, and rampant acts of ghoulishness. Americans are rapidly exchanging their energizing personal inner vibrancy for sedate forms of televised tickling.”
― Kilroy J. Oldster, Dead Toad Scrolls

“The simple idea is the location of an observer at the center and the observed at the circumference, whether the construction is a prison, workhouse, factory, or school. We can thereby, Bentham assures us, 'see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilized society - morals reformed, health preserved, industry reinvigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock.'
Bentham's pantopticon was never constructed, unfortunately for the future of mankind. who had to wait over a century and a half for television.”
― Robert Denoon Cumming, Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought

“Watching TV puts your own hell into a different perspective, if that’s what you want. Today I do.”
― Liz Jensen, The Rapture

“Most people are subconsciously waiting for some people to be rich, or to appear on TV, before they start considering the idea of considering their advice or ideas.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It's television that makes things seem important, whether they are or not.”
― Marilynne Robinson, Home

“Television is at its most trivial and, therefore, most dangerous when its aspirations are high, when it presents itself as a carrier of important cultural conversations.”
― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Ведь память постоянно мутирует. Как с повторами по телевидению, я в таких случаях всякий раз думаю: фильм-то я помню, но разве в нем так все было? А ведь фильм тот же самый, просто насквозь пророс в моем мозгу сорняками забвения. Я говорю про плазму в мозгу, наверное, мутирует именно она. Память. Вот как я себе это представляю: прозрачная масса, в которой светятся разные штуки. Воспоминания, образы — светлячки.”
― Sven Lager, Фосфор

“If you keep pestering the politician, you look like a pest, and America does not tune in to watch pests. It's a chilling thought, that politicians have learned to manipulate the television medium better than the television professionals themselves. When old Cronkite first realized this was happening he imagined the kinds of people who would become politicians in the future. And he shuddered with fear.”
― Nathan Hill, The Nix

“To say that film and television are the same thing is to say poetry and the novel are the same simply because they are words written on a page.”
― J. Andrew Schrecker

“Many are quick to dismiss those who pursue the arts, insisting a degree in one useless or a vow of poverty appropriate, yet wouldn’t want to live in a world without music, literature, television, or videogame.”
― J. Andrew Schrecker

“There are probably no white journalists in America who would say they chose their houses because they were in white neighborhoods, but that, in effect, is what they do. Peter Brown of the Orlando Sentinel looked up the zip codes of 3,400 journalists, and found that they cluster in upscale neighborhoods, far from inner cities. More than one-third of Washington Post reporters live in just four fancy D.C. suburbs. Television personality Chris Matthews routinely promotes integration, and Ted Koppel hectored whites who live apart from blacks. Where do they live? Mr. Matthews in 95-percent white Chevy Case, and Mr. Koppel in Potomac, also in Maryland, which had a black population of 3.9 percent.
Perhaps these men thought they lived inside their television sets. Sociologist Charles Gallagher of La Salle University has noted that television advertising is a 'carefully manufactured racial utopia [...] that is far afield of reality,' where everyone has black and Hispanic neighbors with whom they discuss which brand of toothpaste is best. Jerome D. Williams, a professor of advertising and African American studies at the University of Texas at Austin also laughs at advertisers' depictions of American life, adding that 'if you look at the United States in terms of where we live and who our friends are and where we go to church, we live in different worlds.”
― Jared Taylor, White Identity: Racial Consciousness in the 21st Century

“President Trump is the most ‘entertaining’ president.”
― Steven Magee

“If you were repeatedly taking your broken television to a repair shop for the same fault, you would be annoyed. Unfortunately, millions of sick people are having a similar experience with their doctors visits for their ailing health. Lots of visits for the same problems that never get fixed.”
― Steven Magee

“Broadcast and satellite television and radio, the global positioning system (GPS), cellphones, and WiFi have all come at the expense of the next generation.”
― Steven Magee