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.
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.)
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
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
News is how the government delivers propaganda to the masses and it is an essential requirement of the television broadcasting job to be emotionless to this.
TV pollutes our minds and dulls our senses. It is a babysitter that molests children. And yet those who are on the television scream “first amendment” and “freedom of speech”. How is corporate control freedom of speech? And what rights did our forefathers grant corporations, anyway?
- James Rozoff
The difference between extras and audience members is that audience members don’t get chairs. Audience members are the daylaborers of the industry. When it's sunny, we stand in the sun. When it’s cold, we stand in the cold.
- J. Richard Singleton
Background Guy
What exactly does that expression mean, 'friends with benefits'? Does he provide her with health insurance?
For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evolving, always-in-progress superficiality.
- Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Television
A celebrity is an object that the media manufactures today, just so they have a subject tomorrow.
The value in my room is neither my Television nor my bank note. The value in my room is myself! Why? Because even if I lose everything I have, but still get me, I am coming back with full passion and desperation to climb the unclimbed hills again and again!
- Israelmore Ayivor
All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.
- Dan Harmon
If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous--and it is.
I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.
- Dan Harmon
If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach
them how to use television.
them how to use television.
- Umberto Eco
Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.
“It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.”
Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
- Robert MacNeil
All afternoon, all evening, I lay on the couch, wrapped inside a quilt of sitcoms, the same commercials stitching them together.
- Namwali Serpell
The Furrows
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.)
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
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
News is how the government delivers propaganda to the masses and it is an essential requirement of the television broadcasting job to be emotionless to this.
TV pollutes our minds and dulls our senses. It is a babysitter that molests children. And yet those who are on the television scream “first amendment” and “freedom of speech”. How is corporate control freedom of speech? And what rights did our forefathers grant corporations, anyway?
- James Rozoff
The difference between extras and audience members is that audience members don’t get chairs. Audience members are the daylaborers of the industry. When it's sunny, we stand in the sun. When it’s cold, we stand in the cold.
- J. Richard Singleton
Background Guy
What exactly does that expression mean, 'friends with benefits'? Does he provide her with health insurance?
For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evolving, always-in-progress superficiality.
- Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Television
A celebrity is an object that the media manufactures today, just so they have a subject tomorrow.
The value in my room is neither my Television nor my bank note. The value in my room is myself! Why? Because even if I lose everything I have, but still get me, I am coming back with full passion and desperation to climb the unclimbed hills again and again!
- Israelmore Ayivor
All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.
- Dan Harmon
If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous--and it is.
I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.
- Dan Harmon
If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach
them how to use television.
them how to use television.
- Umberto Eco
Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.
“It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.”
Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
- Robert MacNeil
All afternoon, all evening, I lay on the couch, wrapped inside a quilt of sitcoms, the same commercials stitching them together.
- Namwali Serpell
The Furrows
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
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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.)
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
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
News is how the government delivers propaganda to the masses and it is an essential requirement of the television broadcasting job to be emotionless to this.
TV pollutes our minds and dulls our senses. It is a babysitter that molests children. And yet those who are on the television scream “first amendment” and “freedom of speech”. How is corporate control freedom of speech? And what rights did our forefathers grant corporations, anyway?
- James Rozoff
The difference between extras and audience members is that audience members don’t get chairs. Audience members are the daylaborers of the industry. When it's sunny, we stand in the sun. When it’s cold, we stand in the cold.
- J. Richard Singleton
Background Guy
What exactly does that expression mean, 'friends with benefits'? Does he provide her with health insurance?
For where books, for instance, always offer a thousand times more than they are, television offers exactly what it is, its essential immediacy, its ever-evolving, always-in-progress superficiality.
- Jean-Philippe Toussaint
Television
A celebrity is an object that the media manufactures today, just so they have a subject tomorrow.
The value in my room is neither my Television nor my bank note. The value in my room is myself! Why? Because even if I lose everything I have, but still get me, I am coming back with full passion and desperation to climb the unclimbed hills again and again!
- Israelmore Ayivor
All [tv] shows are like cigarettes. You watch two, you have a higher chance of watching three. They're all addictive.
- Dan Harmon
If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous--and it is.
I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.
- Dan Harmon
If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach
them how to use television.
them how to use television.
- Umberto Eco
Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales.
“It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.”
Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.
- Robert MacNeil
All afternoon, all evening, I lay on the couch, wrapped inside a quilt of sitcoms, the same commercials stitching them together.
- Namwali Serpell
The Furrows