Quotations about Television

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching? ~Nicholas Johnson


I wish there was a knob on the TV so you could turn up the intelligence. They got one marked "brightness" but it don't work, does it? ~Leo Anthony Gallagher


How can you put on a meaningful drama when, every fifteen minutes, proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? ~Rod Serling, quoted in Submitted for Your Approval, Public Broadcasting Station, 1995


Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off. ~Author Unknown


Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other. ~Ann Landers


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


Television has changed a child from an irresistible force to an immovable object. ~Author Unknown


We cannot blame the schools alone for the dismal decline in SAT verbal scores. When our kids come home from school do they pick up a book or do they sit glued to the tube, watching music videos? Parents, don't make the mistake of thinking your kid only learns between 9:00 a.m. and 3:00 p.m. ~George Bush


If you came and you found a strange man... teaching your kids to punch each other, or trying to sell them all kinds of products, you'd kick him right out of the house, but here you are; you come in and the TV is on, and you don't think twice about it. ~Jerome Singer


Television: A medium - so called because it is neither rare nor well done. ~Ernie Kovacs


Today, watching television often means fighting, violence and foul language - and that's just deciding who gets to hold the remote control. ~Donna Gephart


Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home. ~David Frost


Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover. ~Homer Simpson, The Simpsons


Television is simply automated day-dreaming. ~Lee Lovinger


They say that ninety percent of TV is junk. But, ninety percent of everything is junk. ~Gene Roddenberry


The publishers and others should quit worrying about losing customers to TV. The guy who can sit through a trio of deodorant commercials to look at Flashgun Casey or swallow a flock of beer and loan-shark spiels in order to watch a couple of fourth-rate club fighters rub noses on the ropes is not losing any time from book reading. ~Raymond Chandler, 1946


It's the menace that everyone loves to hate but can't seem to live without. ~Paddy Chayevsky


What is being lost is the magic of the word. I am not an image person. Imagery belongs to another civilization: the caveman. Caveman couldn't express himself so he put images on walls. ~Elie Wiesel, 1995


Everything is for the eye these days - TV, Life, Look, the movies. Nothing is just for the mind. The next generation will have eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all. ~Fred Allen


Time has convinced me of one thing. Television is for appearing on, not looking at. ~Noel Coward, attributed


We can put it in its proper perspective by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books. ~Robert M. Hutchins, News Summaries, 31 December 1977


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. ~Author Unknown


Each day, the American housewife turns toward television as toward a lover. She feels guilty about it, and well she might, for he's covered with warts and is only after her money. ~Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966


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, The Golden Apples of the Sun


Television: chewing gum for the eyes. ~Frank Lloyd Wright


Television keeps the masses occupied. What if everyone decided they wanted to make something of their lives? Television keeps the competition down and keeps more criminals off the street. What if everyone decided to go to law school or medical school? It would sure make it tough on the rest of us. ~Jim Urbanovich


Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it. ~Alfred Hitchcock


If it weren't for the fact that the TV set and the refrigerator are so far apart, some of us wouldn't get any exercise at all. ~Joey Adams


Television should be the last mass communication medium to be naively designed and put into the world without a surgeon-general's warning. ~Alan Kay


Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new type program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was. ~Art Buchwald, "Adding Insult to Injury," Have I Ever Lied to You?, 1966


Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity. ~Malcolm Muggeridge


Just because your voice reaches halfway around the world doesn't mean you are wiser than when it reached only to the end of the bar. ~Edward R. Murrow


Television is an anesthetic for the pain of the modern world. ~Astrid Alauda


TV will never be a serious competitor for radio because people must sit and keep their eyes glued on a screen; the average American family hasn't time for it. ~Author Unknown, from New York Times, 1939


Ninety-eight percent of American homes have TV sets, which means the people in the other 2% have to generate their own sex and violence. ~Attributed to Gene Baylos


Your cable television is experiencing difficulties. Please do not panic. Resist the temptation to read or talk to loved ones. Do not attempt sexual relations, as years of TV radiation have left your genitals withered and useless. ~Matt Groening, The Simpsons


Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some. ~Alfred Hitchcock


What compels you to stare, night after night, at all the glittering hokum that has been deliberately put together for you? ~J.B. Priestley, about Americans



So long as there's a jingle in your head, television isn't free. ~Jason Love


I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts. ~Orson Welles


The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross


Television has raised writing to a new low. ~Samuel Goldwyn


Why are sex and violence always linked? I'm afraid they'll blur together in people's minds - sexandviolence - until we can't tell them apart. I expect to hear a newscaster say, "The mob became unruly and the police were forced to resort to sex." ~Dick Cavett, 1978


Theatre is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture. ~Author Unknown


I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision, we shall discover a new and unbearable disturbance of the modern peace, or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure. ~E.B. White


I could have been a doctor, but there were too many good shows on TV. ~Jason Love


Do you realize if it weren't for Edison we'd be watching TV by candlelight? ~Al Boliska


Television is not the Truth. Television is god-damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers and football players. We're in the boredom killing business. ~Paddy Chayevsky


I have had my television aerials removed. It is the moral equivalent of a prostate operation. ~Malcolm Muggeridge


The cable TV sex channels don't expand our horizons, don't make us better people, and don't come in clearly enough. ~Bill Maher


[T]elevision'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 say 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


If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons. ~Daniel Marsh, 1950


Television is a gold goose that lays scramble eggs; and it is futile and probably fatal to beat it for not laying caviar. ~Lee Loevinger


Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel. ~Gore Vidal


All television is children's television. ~Richard P. Adler


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


The marvels - of film, radio, and television - are marvels of one-way communication, which is not communication at all. ~Milton Mayer


Whenever it's on it's like having somebody in my house that I want to get rid of and they won't leave. I hate the sound of it. All that noise and light coming from a piece of furniture. ~John Waters


Philo began laying out his vision for what television could become. Above all else... television would become the world's greatest teaching tool. Illiteracy would be wiped out. The immediacy of television was the key. As news happened viewers would watch it unfold live; no longer would we have to rely on people interpreting and distorting the news for us. We would be watching sporting events and symphony orchestras. Instead of going to the movies, the movies would come to us. Television would also bring about world peace. If we were able to see people in other countries and learn about our differences, why would there be any misunderstandings? War would be a thing of the past. ~Evan I. Schwartz, The Last Lone Inventor, about Philo T. Farnsworth, the inventor of television


Art is moral passion married to entertainment. Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda, and entertainment without moral passion is television. ~Rita Mae Brown


Imagine what it would be like if TV actually were good. It would be the end of everything we know. ~Marvin Minksy


In Beverley Hills, they don't throw their garbage away - they make it into television shows. ~Woody Allen


Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth and fresher breath. ~Dave Barry


If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed. ~Lily Tomlin


I suppose I should get a VCR, but the only thing I like about television is its ephemerality. ~P.J. O'Rourke


If you surveyed a hundred typical middle-aged Americans, I bet you'd find that only two of them could tell you their blood types, but every last one of them would know the theme song from The Beverly Hillbillies. ~Dave Barry


The same media people that claim violence on TV doesn't influence people, are perfectly willing to sell you advertising time. ~Author Unknown


TV a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. ~Goodman Ace


I have come to the feeling about television the way I do about hamburgers: I eat a lot of hamburgers and I don't remember a single one of them. ~John Barrow, 1973


The triumph of machine over people. ~Fred Allen, about television


I have never seen a bad television program, because I refuse to. God gave me a mind, and a wrist that turns things off. ~Jack Paar


If it weren't for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners. ~Johnny Carson


There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment possibilities than the TV set. ~Harriet van Horne


When television came roaring in after the war (World War II) they did a little school survey asking children which they preferred and why - television or radio. And there was this 7-year-old boy who said he preferred radio "because the pictures were better." ~Alistair Cooke