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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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shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?
- David Foster Wallace
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Television has a satanic influence.
- Paramahansa Yogananda
Conversations with Yogananda: Stories, Sayings and Wisdom
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.
- Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You don't talk; you watch talk shows. You don't play games; you watch game shows.

Travel, relationships, risk: Every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance, so that you can remain ever sheltered, ever passive, ever ravenous consumers who can't bring themselves to rise from their couches, break a sweat, and participate in life.
- Brad Bird
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon would say, "I want to go to there."
- Lucy Mangan
Inside Charlie's Chocolate Factory: The Complete Story of Willy Wonka, the Golden Ticket, and Roald Dahl's Most Famous Creation.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What is friendship but a mutual respect with a smattering of envy.
Emma Beers Jones
- Maria P Frino
Fame & Other Disasters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-
just-TV schticks, the circle back to the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic
postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.
- David Foster Wallace
E Unibus Pluram
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..Octopuses appear to enjoy watching Many home aquarists report that their octopuses appear to enjoy watching television with them. They particularly like sports and cartoons, with lots of movement and color....King and her coauthor, Colin Dunlop, even suggest placing the tank in the same room as the TV, so owner and octopus can enjoy programs together.
- Sy Montgomery
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...and she wipes weary from her eyes
still glued to the no-good
glued to the high definition glare
of low-definition life
- Jason Griffin
Ain't Burned All the Bright
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it’s over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.
- Thomas C. Foster
How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Robert lay on the bed and checked the remote to see the time on the television screen. Other than that function, the black box was completely useless, another tool of control.
- Kenneth Eade
An Evil Trade
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's a cartoon but it's got like the whole meaning of life in it. (road runner) I mean, what doe it tell you? It tells you that your body can be broken but it will mend. It tells you that if you do bad things they will rebound on you. It tells you that death is the end. It tells you that you can walk on air, as long as you don't realize you're doing it.
- Nick Lake
Satellite
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know it's Thanksgiving Day in America,
When families are sitting in their living room watching Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on television.
- Charmaine J. Forde
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The television set groaned and wept blood when they turned it on.
- Michael Swanwick
The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
An aversion to boredom and a low tolerance for delayed gratification are at the root of binge culture. ... we have become a 'bingey society' because 'our souls aren't being attended to, in the world that we live in -- and so, we stuff them. With work, with food, with leisure. We're greedy. It comes from being given too much and at the same time too little.' Or as Oscar Wilde put it, 'Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
- Pandora Sykes
How Do We Know We're Doing It Right: & Other Essays on Modern Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In other words, so far as many reputable studies are concerned, television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As the 5G wireless radiation system was slowly being installed in Tucson, Arizona, USA, I started to lose over the air television reception. The more transmitters that were installed, the worse the reception became.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the emu, not standing up to the cassowary, accompanied the cassowary on their continued journey of the safari, never to return because a zebra herd trapped them back into pre-color television times indefinitely.
- J.S. Mason
The Ghost Therapist...And Other Grand Delights
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The brevity of our lives makes watching TV seem like a symptom of insanity.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The simple idea is the location of an observer at the center and the observed at the circumference, whether the construction is a prison, workhouse, factory, or school. We can thereby, Bentham assures us, 'see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilized society - morals reformed, health preserved, industry reinvigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock.'
Bentham's pantopticon was never constructed, unfortunately for the future of mankind. who had to wait over a century and a half for television.
- Robert Denoon Cumming
Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?
- David Foster Wallace
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Television has a satanic influence.
- Paramahansa Yogananda
Conversations with Yogananda: Stories, Sayings and Wisdom
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.
- Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You don't talk; you watch talk shows. You don't play games; you watch game shows.

Travel, relationships, risk: Every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance, so that you can remain ever sheltered, ever passive, ever ravenous consumers who can't bring themselves to rise from their couches, break a sweat, and participate in life.
- Brad Bird
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon would say, "I want to go to there."
- Lucy Mangan
Inside Charlie's Chocolate Factory: The Complete Story of Willy Wonka, the Golden Ticket, and Roald Dahl's Most Famous Creation.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What is friendship but a mutual respect with a smattering of envy.
Emma Beers Jones
- Maria P Frino
Fame & Other Disasters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-
just-TV schticks, the circle back to the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic
postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.
- David Foster Wallace
E Unibus Pluram
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..Octopuses appear to enjoy watching Many home aquarists report that their octopuses appear to enjoy watching television with them. They particularly like sports and cartoons, with lots of movement and color....King and her coauthor, Colin Dunlop, even suggest placing the tank in the same room as the TV, so owner and octopus can enjoy programs together.
- Sy Montgomery
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...and she wipes weary from her eyes
still glued to the no-good
glued to the high definition glare
of low-definition life
- Jason Griffin
Ain't Burned All the Bright
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it’s over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.
- Thomas C. Foster
How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Robert lay on the bed and checked the remote to see the time on the television screen. Other than that function, the black box was completely useless, another tool of control.
- Kenneth Eade
An Evil Trade
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's a cartoon but it's got like the whole meaning of life in it. (road runner) I mean, what doe it tell you? It tells you that your body can be broken but it will mend. It tells you that if you do bad things they will rebound on you. It tells you that death is the end. It tells you that you can walk on air, as long as you don't realize you're doing it.
- Nick Lake
Satellite
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know it's Thanksgiving Day in America,
When families are sitting in their living room watching Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on television.
- Charmaine J. Forde
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The television set groaned and wept blood when they turned it on.
- Michael Swanwick
The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
An aversion to boredom and a low tolerance for delayed gratification are at the root of binge culture. ... we have become a 'bingey society' because 'our souls aren't being attended to, in the world that we live in -- and so, we stuff them. With work, with food, with leisure. We're greedy. It comes from being given too much and at the same time too little.' Or as Oscar Wilde put it, 'Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
- Pandora Sykes
How Do We Know We're Doing It Right: & Other Essays on Modern Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In other words, so far as many reputable studies are concerned, television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As the 5G wireless radiation system was slowly being installed in Tucson, Arizona, USA, I started to lose over the air television reception. The more transmitters that were installed, the worse the reception became.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the emu, not standing up to the cassowary, accompanied the cassowary on their continued journey of the safari, never to return because a zebra herd trapped them back into pre-color television times indefinitely.
- J.S. Mason
The Ghost Therapist...And Other Grand Delights
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The brevity of our lives makes watching TV seem like a symptom of insanity.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The simple idea is the location of an observer at the center and the observed at the circumference, whether the construction is a prison, workhouse, factory, or school. We can thereby, Bentham assures us, 'see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilized society - morals reformed, health preserved, industry reinvigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock.'
Bentham's pantopticon was never constructed, unfortunately for the future of mankind. who had to wait over a century and a half for television.
- Robert Denoon Cumming
Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
shall I spend much of your time pointing out the degree to which televisual values influence the contemporary mood of jaded weltschmerz, self-mocking materialism, blank indifference, and the delusion that cynicism and naïveté are mutually exclusive?
- David Foster Wallace
A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Television has a satanic influence.
- Paramahansa Yogananda
Conversations with Yogananda: Stories, Sayings and Wisdom
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.
- Arundhati Roy
The God of Small Things
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You don't talk; you watch talk shows. You don't play games; you watch game shows.

Travel, relationships, risk: Every meaningful experience must be packaged and delivered to you to watch at a distance, so that you can remain ever sheltered, ever passive, ever ravenous consumers who can't bring themselves to rise from their couches, break a sweat, and participate in life.
- Brad Bird
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon would say, "I want to go to there."
- Lucy Mangan
Inside Charlie's Chocolate Factory: The Complete Story of Willy Wonka, the Golden Ticket, and Roald Dahl's Most Famous Creation.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
What is friendship but a mutual respect with a smattering of envy.
Emma Beers Jones
- Maria P Frino
Fame & Other Disasters
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And with Letterman, Miller, Shandling, and Leno’s battery of hip, sardonic, this-is-
just-TV schticks, the circle back to the days of “We’ve just got to get Miss Ball on our show, Bud” has closed and come spiral, television’s power to jettison connection and castrate protest fueled by the very ironic
postmodern self-consciousness it had first helped fashion.
- David Foster Wallace
E Unibus Pluram
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
..Octopuses appear to enjoy watching Many home aquarists report that their octopuses appear to enjoy watching television with them. They particularly like sports and cartoons, with lots of movement and color....King and her coauthor, Colin Dunlop, even suggest placing the tank in the same room as the TV, so owner and octopus can enjoy programs together.
- Sy Montgomery
The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration into the Wonder of Consciousness
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
...and she wipes weary from her eyes
still glued to the no-good
glued to the high definition glare
of low-definition life
- Jason Griffin
Ain't Burned All the Bright
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it’s over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.
- Thomas C. Foster
How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
Robert lay on the bed and checked the remote to see the time on the television screen. Other than that function, the black box was completely useless, another tool of control.
- Kenneth Eade
An Evil Trade
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
It's a cartoon but it's got like the whole meaning of life in it. (road runner) I mean, what doe it tell you? It tells you that your body can be broken but it will mend. It tells you that if you do bad things they will rebound on you. It tells you that death is the end. It tells you that you can walk on air, as long as you don't realize you're doing it.
- Nick Lake
Satellite
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You know it's Thanksgiving Day in America,
When families are sitting in their living room watching Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade on television.
- Charmaine J. Forde
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The television set groaned and wept blood when they turned it on.
- Michael Swanwick
The Iron Dragon's Daughter
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
An aversion to boredom and a low tolerance for delayed gratification are at the root of binge culture. ... we have become a 'bingey society' because 'our souls aren't being attended to, in the world that we live in -- and so, we stuff them. With work, with food, with leisure. We're greedy. It comes from being given too much and at the same time too little.' Or as Oscar Wilde put it, 'Moderation is a fatal thing. Nothing succeeds like excess.
- Pandora Sykes
How Do We Know We're Doing It Right: & Other Essays on Modern Life
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
In other words, so far as many reputable studies are concerned, television viewing does not significantly increase learning, is inferior to and less likely than print to cultivate higher-order, inferential thinking.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking.
- Neil Postman
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
As the 5G wireless radiation system was slowly being installed in Tucson, Arizona, USA, I started to lose over the air television reception. The more transmitters that were installed, the worse the reception became.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
And the emu, not standing up to the cassowary, accompanied the cassowary on their continued journey of the safari, never to return because a zebra herd trapped them back into pre-color television times indefinitely.
- J.S. Mason
The Ghost Therapist...And Other Grand Delights
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The brevity of our lives makes watching TV seem like a symptom of insanity.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The simple idea is the location of an observer at the center and the observed at the circumference, whether the construction is a prison, workhouse, factory, or school. We can thereby, Bentham assures us, 'see a new scene of things spread itself over the face of civilized society - morals reformed, health preserved, industry reinvigorated, instruction diffused, public burthens lightened, economy seated as it were upon a rock.'
Bentham's pantopticon was never constructed, unfortunately for the future of mankind. who had to wait over a century and a half for television.
- Robert Denoon Cumming
Human Nature and History: A Study of the Development of Liberal Political Thought
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
You are more likely to find three TVs inside a randomly selected house than you are to find a single book that is or was not read to pass an exam, to please God, or to be a better cook.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
The instrument (the telescreen, it was called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely.
Avg Rating: --Rate This Quote
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7
8
9
10
11
 		...