The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television.
—Unknown
The remarkable thing about television is that it permits several million people to laugh at the same joke and still feel lonely.
—George Eliot (Mary Anne Evans) (1819–80) English Novelist
Television’s perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don’t have to concentrate. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to remember. You don’t miss your brain because you don’t need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man’s nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn’t got the price of a television set.
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) American Novelist
If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.
—John Lennon (1940–80) British Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Activist
People assume you can’t be shy and be on television. They’re wrong.
—Diane Sawyer (b.1945) American Journalist, TV Personality
So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (b.1941) American Social Critic, Essayist
The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing.
—Carl Bernstein (1944–73) American Journalist, Writer
Television is the triumph of machine over people.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.
—C. P. Scott (1846–1932) British Journalist, Editor, Politician
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.
—Ursula K. Le Guin (b.1929) American Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer
Already we viewers, when not viewing, have begun to whisper to one another that the more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
—J. B. Priestley (1894–1984) English Novelist, Playwright, Critic
Performing doesn’t turn me on. It’s an egomaniac business, filled with prima donnas—including this one.
—Dan Rather (b.1931) American Newscaster, Author
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.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.
—Ask Ann Landers (1918–2002) American Advice Columnist
We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg’s great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
—Robert Maynard Hutchins (1899–1977) American Educator
Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower (1890–1969) American Head of State, Military Leader
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?
—Joyce Carol Oates (b.1938) American Novelist, Short Story Writer, Playwright, Poet, Literary Critic
Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?
—Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) Polish-born American Film Producer, Businessperson
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90) English Journalist, Author, Media Personality, Satirist
Television has brought back murder into the home—where it belongs.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.
—Ray Bradbury (b.1920) American Novelist, Short Story Writer
Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.
—Marshall Mcluhan (1911–80) Canadian Writer, Thinker, Educator
TV. If kids are entertained by two letters, imagine the fun they’ll have with twenty-six. Open your child’s imagination. Open a book.
—Indian Proverb
Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Humorist, Radio Personality
Television is not real life. In real life people actually have to leave the coffee shop and go to jobs.
—Bill Gates (b.1955) American Businessperson, Entrepreneur, Philanthropist, Author
Television has raised writing to a new low.
—Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) Polish-born American Film Producer, Businessperson
So by all means let’s have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all the public is entitled to what it wants, isn’t it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959) American Novelist
Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know.
—Marvin Minsky (1927–2016) American Computer Scientist
Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
—T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) American-born British Poet, Dramatist, Literary Critic
What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdad’s of his dreams to rise from the dust.
—Salvador Dali (1904–89) Spanish Painter
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.
—John Berger (1926–2017) English Art Critic, Novelist
The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.
—E. B. White (1985–99) American Essayist, Humorist
Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.
—Arthur Miller (1915–2005) American Playwright, Essayist
Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.
—Laurence J. Peter (1919–90) Canadian-born American Educator, Author
Television is becoming a collage—there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.
—David Hockney (b.1937) English Painter, Draughtsman
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.
—Eric Sevareid (1912–92) American Journalist, Author
I find television to be very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go in the other room and read a book.
—Groucho Marx (1890–1977) American Actor, Comedian, Singer
Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn’t have in your home.
—David Frost (1939–2013) English Broadcaster, Writer
I would rather live my life than watch another person’s life on T.V.
—Indian Proverb
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.
—Orson Welles (1915–85) American Film Director, Actor
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 (1908–65) American Journalist, Radio Personality
Star Trek fans usually know the metaphors of life better than most mainstream poets.
—Terri Guillemets
Television: chewing gum for the eyes.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
He who is created by television can be destroyed by television.
—Theodore H. White (1915–86) American Journalist, Historian, Novelist
I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.
—Alice Walker (b.1944) American Novelist, Activist