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QUOTES ABOUT TELEVISION

Television has been a constant presence in everyday life, informing, entertaining, and shaping how stories are shared across generations. It reflects changing cultures, technologies, and tastes while connecting audiences through shared moments on screen. The following quotes explore the impact, power, and possibilities of television in all its forms.   ◀ Back
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Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me.
- David Sedaris
Me Talk Pretty One Day
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For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
- Jonathan Lethem
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.
- George Gerbner
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.
- Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.
- Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The antennae on his head look weird, I agree...but now I get Hulu and Netflix for free.
- GLEN NESBITT
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I miss those days of live television. There was that electric sense of excitement, of importance, when you sent that signal, at that very moment into people’s homes. That sense of urgency is diminished in the refinement of perfecting everything through multiple tapings until the talent and production crew get it right. Often during this process the original vitality is lost along with that sense of power, of instantly connecting with the audience
- Ron Hull
Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When asked, I told the board that public television should never be judged by the number of people who watch. That’s a competition we’ll never win, but rather, the measure is the impact our programming has on the people who do watch.
- Ron Hull
Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The kind of men you see in the movies would be hard to handle in real life, though – they’re so fixated on their own masculinity. And sometimes that male pride, that proper behaviour, it all starts to seem ridiculous. If they could just get over themselves, then everything might be a whole lot simpler.
- Izumi Suzuki
Terminal Boredom: Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Betty White is the First Lady of Television in her own right. She inspired me to write among other artists.
- Laika Constantino
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Harriet Nelson was my idol when I was growing up. She was everything I wanted to become-- a wife, a mother, and a homemaker. I watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet every week on television, reverently noting Harriet's clever way with her husband and sons, her calm demeanor, how she dressed up each day to stay at home taking care of her family. I loved how they worshipped her. And I coveted her apron.
My own mother was an amazing woman; long before it was the norm, she had a college degree, worked full time, and raised six children. She enjoyed her career and was successful at it, but as far as I was concerned, the job I wanted was Harriet's.
- EllynAnne Geisel
The Apron Book: Making, Wearing, and Sharing a Bit of Cloth and Comfort
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
TV news has taught me vigilance can make the difference between being safe and becoming a victim.
- Christina Estes
Off the Air
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Have you seen our ratings, Jolene? It’s like we’re back in the nineties. People are watching local TV news again!
- Christina Estes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good.
Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I'll show you someone who probably isn't very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don't need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m.
Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.
- M.J. DeMarco
The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Pink Panther had been playing on the old antennae TV. He remembered how the slinky, suggestive saxophone triggered something abstractly pleasurable in his child-self.
- Sophia Al-Maria
The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
People who view television more often than the average tend also to have worse jobs and worse relationships. In a large scale study in Germany, it was found that the more often people report reading books, the more flow experiences they claimed to have. While the opposite trend was found for watching television. The most flow was reported by individuals who read a lot and watched little TV. The least by those who read seldom and watched often.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One reason television is such a perilous medium is that even infants less than two years old imitate what they see on the screen, yet what appears there is determined by what happens to appeal or to sell rather than by what behavior helped individuals in a particular past environment to survive or prosper.
- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The most important thing that most people get from the news is the prediction of the following day’s weather, which most people are usually able to predict correctly by themselves.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as in the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator
- Marc Fumaroli
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know, Granna, going around saying how you don't watch TV... It's not even pretentious anymore... it's just plain out of it.
- Donald Margulies
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Old movies already in
progress, already passed over
twice, watched with indifference
until orchestras swell over
happy endings, new beginnings.

The images black and white,
the lie white. (Ours is a world of
heroes and of winners, and rarely
are they one in the same.)
- J. Andrew Schrecker
Insomniacs, We
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he's been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.
- Barbara Kingsolver
Pigs in Heaven
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me.
- David Sedaris
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
- Jonathan Lethem
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.
- George Gerbner
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.
- Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.
- Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The antennae on his head look weird, I agree...but now I get Hulu and Netflix for free.
- GLEN NESBITT
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I miss those days of live television. There was that electric sense of excitement, of importance, when you sent that signal, at that very moment into people’s homes. That sense of urgency is diminished in the refinement of perfecting everything through multiple tapings until the talent and production crew get it right. Often during this process the original vitality is lost along with that sense of power, of instantly connecting with the audience
- Ron Hull
Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When asked, I told the board that public television should never be judged by the number of people who watch. That’s a competition we’ll never win, but rather, the measure is the impact our programming has on the people who do watch.
- Ron Hull
Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The kind of men you see in the movies would be hard to handle in real life, though – they’re so fixated on their own masculinity. And sometimes that male pride, that proper behaviour, it all starts to seem ridiculous. If they could just get over themselves, then everything might be a whole lot simpler.
- Izumi Suzuki
Terminal Boredom: Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Betty White is the First Lady of Television in her own right. She inspired me to write among other artists.
- Laika Constantino
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Harriet Nelson was my idol when I was growing up. She was everything I wanted to become-- a wife, a mother, and a homemaker. I watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet every week on television, reverently noting Harriet's clever way with her husband and sons, her calm demeanor, how she dressed up each day to stay at home taking care of her family. I loved how they worshipped her. And I coveted her apron.
My own mother was an amazing woman; long before it was the norm, she had a college degree, worked full time, and raised six children. She enjoyed her career and was successful at it, but as far as I was concerned, the job I wanted was Harriet's.
- EllynAnne Geisel
The Apron Book: Making, Wearing, and Sharing a Bit of Cloth and Comfort
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
TV news has taught me vigilance can make the difference between being safe and becoming a victim.
- Christina Estes
Off the Air
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Have you seen our ratings, Jolene? It’s like we’re back in the nineties. People are watching local TV news again!
- Christina Estes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good.
Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I'll show you someone who probably isn't very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don't need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m.
Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.
- M.J. DeMarco
The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Pink Panther had been playing on the old antennae TV. He remembered how the slinky, suggestive saxophone triggered something abstractly pleasurable in his child-self.
- Sophia Al-Maria
The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
People who view television more often than the average tend also to have worse jobs and worse relationships. In a large scale study in Germany, it was found that the more often people report reading books, the more flow experiences they claimed to have. While the opposite trend was found for watching television. The most flow was reported by individuals who read a lot and watched little TV. The least by those who read seldom and watched often.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One reason television is such a perilous medium is that even infants less than two years old imitate what they see on the screen, yet what appears there is determined by what happens to appeal or to sell rather than by what behavior helped individuals in a particular past environment to survive or prosper.
- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The most important thing that most people get from the news is the prediction of the following day’s weather, which most people are usually able to predict correctly by themselves.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as in the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator
- Marc Fumaroli
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know, Granna, going around saying how you don't watch TV... It's not even pretentious anymore... it's just plain out of it.
- Donald Margulies
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Old movies already in
progress, already passed over
twice, watched with indifference
until orchestras swell over
happy endings, new beginnings.

The images black and white,
the lie white. (Ours is a world of
heroes and of winners, and rarely
are they one in the same.)
- J. Andrew Schrecker
Insomniacs, We
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he's been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.
- Barbara Kingsolver
Pigs in Heaven
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me.
- David Sedaris
Me Talk Pretty One Day
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.
- Jonathan Lethem
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know, who tells the stories of a culture really governs human behaviour. It used to be the parent, the school, the church, the community. Now it's a handful of global conglomerates that have nothing to tell, but a great deal to sell.
- George Gerbner
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.
- Christopher Hitchens
Christopher Hitchens and His Critics: Terror, Iraq, and the Left
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.
- Kate Morton
The Forgotten Garden
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The antennae on his head look weird, I agree...but now I get Hulu and Netflix for free.
- GLEN NESBITT
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
I miss those days of live television. There was that electric sense of excitement, of importance, when you sent that signal, at that very moment into people’s homes. That sense of urgency is diminished in the refinement of perfecting everything through multiple tapings until the talent and production crew get it right. Often during this process the original vitality is lost along with that sense of power, of instantly connecting with the audience
- Ron Hull
Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
When asked, I told the board that public television should never be judged by the number of people who watch. That’s a competition we’ll never win, but rather, the measure is the impact our programming has on the people who do watch.
- Ron Hull
Backstage: Stories from My Life in Public Television
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The kind of men you see in the movies would be hard to handle in real life, though – they’re so fixated on their own masculinity. And sometimes that male pride, that proper behaviour, it all starts to seem ridiculous. If they could just get over themselves, then everything might be a whole lot simpler.
- Izumi Suzuki
Terminal Boredom: Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Betty White is the First Lady of Television in her own right. She inspired me to write among other artists.
- Laika Constantino
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Harriet Nelson was my idol when I was growing up. She was everything I wanted to become-- a wife, a mother, and a homemaker. I watched The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet every week on television, reverently noting Harriet's clever way with her husband and sons, her calm demeanor, how she dressed up each day to stay at home taking care of her family. I loved how they worshipped her. And I coveted her apron.
My own mother was an amazing woman; long before it was the norm, she had a college degree, worked full time, and raised six children. She enjoyed her career and was successful at it, but as far as I was concerned, the job I wanted was Harriet's.
- EllynAnne Geisel
The Apron Book: Making, Wearing, and Sharing a Bit of Cloth and Comfort
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
TV news has taught me vigilance can make the difference between being safe and becoming a victim.
- Christina Estes
Off the Air
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Have you seen our ratings, Jolene? It’s like we’re back in the nineties. People are watching local TV news again!
- Christina Estes
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Bill of Rights is largely a prescription for preventing government from restricting the flow of information and ideas. But the Founding Fathers did not foresee that tyranny by government might be superseded by another sort of problem altogether, namely, the corporate state, which through television now controls the flow of public discourse in America.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Our television set keeps us in constant communion with the world, but it does so with a face whose smiling countenance is unalterable. The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining, which is another issue altogether.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The average American watches more than four hours of TV each day. In a 65-year life, that person will have spent nine years glued to the tube. Why? Simple. Life sucks. Life needs an escape. Life is no good.
Show me someone who spends hours online playing Mafia Wars or Farmville, and I'll show you someone who probably isn't very successful. When life sucks, escapes are sought. I don't need television because I invested my time into a real life worth living, not a fictitious escape that airs every Tuesday night at 8 p.m.
Again, majority thinking yields mediocrity, and for that majority, time is an asset that is undervalued and mindlessly squandered.
- M.J. DeMarco
The Millionaire Fastlane: Crack the Code to Wealth and Live Rich for a Lifetime!
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The Pink Panther had been playing on the old antennae TV. He remembered how the slinky, suggestive saxophone triggered something abstractly pleasurable in his child-self.
- Sophia Al-Maria
The Djinn Falls in Love & Other Stories
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
People who view television more often than the average tend also to have worse jobs and worse relationships. In a large scale study in Germany, it was found that the more often people report reading books, the more flow experiences they claimed to have. While the opposite trend was found for watching television. The most flow was reported by individuals who read a lot and watched little TV. The least by those who read seldom and watched often.
- Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
Finding Flow: The Psychology of Engagement with Everyday Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
One reason television is such a perilous medium is that even infants less than two years old imitate what they see on the screen, yet what appears there is determined by what happens to appeal or to sell rather than by what behavior helped individuals in a particular past environment to survive or prosper.
- Sarah Blaffer Hrdy
Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The most important thing that most people get from the news is the prediction of the following day’s weather, which most people are usually able to predict correctly by themselves.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as in the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator
- Marc Fumaroli
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know, Granna, going around saying how you don't watch TV... It's not even pretentious anymore... it's just plain out of it.
- Donald Margulies
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Old movies already in
progress, already passed over
twice, watched with indifference
until orchestras swell over
happy endings, new beginnings.

The images black and white,
the lie white. (Ours is a world of
heroes and of winners, and rarely
are they one in the same.)
- J. Andrew Schrecker
Insomniacs, We
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
She told him television was a bad influence. Probably she was right. Like those white birds he's been seeing outside the window, it flashes its wings and promises whatever you want, even before you knew you wanted it.
- Barbara Kingsolver
Pigs in Heaven
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...
11
12
13
14
15
 		...