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
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
He who is created by television can be destroyed by television.
—Theodore H. White (1915–86) American Journalist, Historian, Novelist
Television has brought back murder into the home—where it belongs.
—Alfred Hitchcock (1899–1980) British-born American Film Director, Film Producer
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
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
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
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
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 lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.
—Nathalie Sarraute (1900–99) French Novelist, Essayist
The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television.
—Unknown
People assume you can’t be shy and be on television. They’re wrong.
—Diane Sawyer (b.1945) American Television News Journalist
Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.
—Laurence J. Peter (1919–90) Canadian-Born American Author
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 Broadcast Journalist
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
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
Imitation is the sincerest form of television.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Comedian, 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
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 has raised writing to a new low.
—Samuel Goldwyn (1879–1974) Polish-born American Film Producer, Businessperson
Television is the triumph of machine over people.
—Fred Allen (1894–1956) American Comedian, Radio Personality
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
Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television.
—Rita Mae Brown (b.1944) American Writer, Feminist
Dealing with network executives is like being nibbled to death by ducks.
—Eric Sevareid (1912–92) American Journalist, Author
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
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
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
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
If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.
—John Lennon (1940–80) British Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Activist
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
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