Television/Quotes

"Sam: Is that ethical? It can't be ethical! Al: No, it's television."

- Quantum Leap, "Moments to Live"

""Whom the gods would destroy, they first give television.""

- Arthur C. Clarke

""Y'know, with this digital technology, the suckiness comes through with great clarity.""

- Mike Nelson, Mystery Science Theater 3000

""I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.""

- Gore Vidal

""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 either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television.""

- E. B. White, Harper's Bazaar, 1938

""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

""The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter, but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining.""

- Neil Postman

""It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper.""

- Rod Serling

""Action sequences filmed in Confuse-O-Vision.""

- Joel Robinson, Mystery Science Theater 3000

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

- Calvin and Hobbes

"Garfield: Television is only so much mindless drivel. Glossy adventures, sex and violence... Ain't it great?"

- Garfield

""You people sit there, day after day, night after night. You're all ages, colors, creeds. We're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think the tube is reality and your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you! You dress like the tube, eat like the tube, raise your children like the tube, even think like the tube. This is mass madness, you maniacs! In God's name, you people are the real thing! We are the illusion! So turn off your television sets. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off in the middle of this sentence. Turn them off!""

- Howard Beale

""Lemmie think. What did I learn in the real world? What's the one thing most likely to rot people's minds and reduce their brains to mashed potatoes? I remember now - television!""

- Bowser Koopa

""Television is a medium because it is neither rare nor well done""

- Ernie Kovacs

""Of course, the great thing about television is that it lets you see events live as they happen, like old movies from thirty years ago.""

- Rock Hunter (Tony Randall)

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

- Paddy Chayefsky

"Masturbation is the thinking man's television."

- Christopher Hampton, Philanthropist (1970)

"Television has brought back murder into the home -- where it belongs."

- Alfred Hitchcock

"Theatre is Life, Film is Art, Television is Furniture."

"Everything is illusionary, but television is especially illusionary."

"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

"Television, the drug of the nation, Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation."

- The Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy

"''In Beverly Hills... they don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows."

- Woody Allen

"''Writing for television is a debilitating exercise. How can you inspire an audience to their best when every fourteen minutes someone interrupts to tell them that they're unfit to live with? The ultimate purpose of commercial television is to convince the viewer that he smells bad."

- "Solomon Short" (David Gerrold)

"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, "Kids Today: They Don't Know Dum Diddly"

"I watch television because you don't know what it will do if you leave it in the room alone."

"It's as bloody as Shakespeare but without the intelligence and the poetry. If you watch television news you know less about the world than if you drank gin out of a bottle."

- Garrison Keillor

"There is no dignity in television."

- Adam Savage, MythBusters

"Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked "Brightness," but it doesn't work."

- George Carlin

"TV -- Chewing gum for the eyes."

"''I'll watch some TV, it'll help me to RELAX!"

- Ren Hoek

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

- Marvin Minsky


 * Back to