Television Quotes

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.

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

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal.

Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.

Calvin:"It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?"Television: "...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet

Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.

Well, fame is a drug and when you take it away from an addict, things can get ugly.

If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teachthem how to use television.

The future is all around us, waiting in moments of transition to be born in moments of revelation. No one knows the shape of the future or where it will take us. We know only that it is always born in pain.

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.

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.

Last week, I suggested the candidates take up mushrooms. I’ll be damned if Rick Perry didn’t take me up on that.

Is my coitus whimsically inventive?

When I was in junior high school, I used to think that Disney's 1990's paranormal television program 'So Weird' was every kid's ideal life - not going to school, living on a tour bus, having rockstar parents, traveling all over North America and never staying in one place for more than a week or so. Of course, eventually the realization hits you that the kids out there who really do live like this, pulling up stakes every week and never staying with their friends or having a permanent residence, aren't really happy.

For good health, watch what you eat. For a good head, watch what you watch.

So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,Go throw your TV set away,And in its place you can installA lovely bookshelf on the wall.Then fill the shelves with lots of books.

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

There's a hum that happens inside my head when I hit a certain writing rhythm, a certain speed. When laying track goes from feeling like climbing a mountain on my hands and knees to feeling like flying effortlessly through the air. Like breaking the sound barrier. everything inside me just shifts. I break the writing barrier. And the feeling of laying track changes, transforms, shifts from exertion into exultation.

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

She put others before herself and yet you hate her. What did she do to you?

I devised a test.I turned off the TV and instantly the snoring stopped. She began to move. When I felt her eyes about to open, I turned the TV back on and back to sleep she went. Then I'd turn it off and on - sometimes for millisecond - and she never failed me. Each time it was off, she's move and mutter - each time it was on, she'd sleep.By the time the headlights from Amy's Nova turned into our driveway, my suspicion had been confirmed. My mother has a more intimate, connected relationship with this television than she has ever had with me.

Since I got rid of syndicated and indoctrinated media my life is a product of what I seek and not what I am told. I recommend everyone in the age of information to demand more of what they seek rather simply pushing the favorite list on their remote control.

Children playing while in the background the TV blares with screams, gunfire and rape-murder scenes. It seeps in.

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

No matter what it is, if you don’t move your eyes and set the pace yourself, your intellect is sentenced to death. The mind, you see, is like a muscle. For it to remain agile and strong, it must work. Television rules that out.

You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.

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.

What exactly does that expression mean, 'friends with benefits'? Does he provide her with health insurance?

Celebrity mentality sometimes misguides us to make wrong choices. That’s why T.V screens sometimes lie to us!

If naturalists go to heaven (about which there is considerable ecclesiastical doubt), I hope that I will be furnished with a troop of kakapo to amuse me in the evening instead of television.

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

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.

Do you know we are being led toSlaughters by placid admirals& that fat slow generals are gettingObscene on young bloodDo you know we are ruled by t.v.

You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.

‪Am I dead? Is this heaven? No, I can't be. I'm realizing this as I process my second sensation: discomfort. I turn my head. Ooh, a TV. Maybe it is heaven.

In previous centuries, the Church was the great controller, dictating morality, stifling free expression and posing as conservator of all great art and music. Instead we have TV, doing just as good a job at dictating fashions, thoughts, attitudes, objectives as did the Church, using many of the same techniques but doing it so palatably that no one notices. Instead of ‘sins’ to keep people in line, we have fears of being judged unacceptable by our peers (by not wearing the right shoes, not drinking the right kind of beer, or wearing the wrong kind of deodorant). Coupled with that fear is imposed insecurity concerning our own identities. All answers and solutions to these fears come through the television, and only through television. Only through exposure to TV can the new sins of alienation and ostracism be absolved.

Why do they call them daytime dramas, anyway? Shouldn't they be bedtime dramas? All anyone ever talks about is getting someone into bed! Plus if you're at home watching, you're probably watching in bed. And if you're like me, after an hour or two of watching all those sexy goings-on you forget the silly story entirely and fall asleep. Just like it's bedtime!

If you look into the face of evil, evil's gonna look right back at you

Advertisement shouldn’t look like information, it should look like a promise.

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.

Television is chewing gum for the eyes.

Confession: I don't want everybody to be beautiful, not in that unlined, creaseless, symmetrical way. Android beauty, like it comes out of a test tube. Beauty without blemish or mark. Not only do I not identify with such people, I don't believe in them either. I don't even find them attractive. This is what makes watching television so hard: they don't cast actors anymore, only models. When they make a movie of my life, they'd better cast a character actor in the lead. Don't try to tell me I'm not a character.

If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.