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
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, Playwright, Poet, Literary Critic
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, 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
If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.
—John Lennon (1940–80) British Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Activist
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, Author, Philanthropist
People assume you can’t be shy and be on television. They’re wrong.
—Diane Sawyer (b.1945) American Television News Journalist
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Comedian, Radio Personality
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
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 Educational Philosopher
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 has raised writing to a new low.
—Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) Polish-born American Film Producer, Businessperson
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 (1941–2022) American Social Critic, Essayist
Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.
—Ask Ann Landers (1918–2002) American Advice Columnist
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
I would rather live my life than watch another person’s life on T.V.
—Indian Proverb
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.
—Eric Sevareid (1912–92) American Journalist, Author
Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.
—Laurence J. Peter (1919–90) Canadian-Born American Author
Television is the triumph of machine over people.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Comedian, Radio Personality
Television: chewing gum for the eyes.
—Frank Lloyd Wright (1867–1959) American Architect
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 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-British Poet, Dramatist, Literary Critic
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
Television is for appearing on – not for looking at.
—Noel Coward (1899–1973) English Dramatist, Actor, Composer
He who is created by television can be destroyed by television.
—Theodore H. White (1915–86) American Journalist, Historian, Novelist
The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television.
—Unknown
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
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 was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–90) English Journalist, Author, Satirist, Media Personality
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
Leave a Reply