Best Top 100 Inspirational & Funny Television Day Quotes

“The most exciting acting tends to happen in roles you never thought you could play.” – John Lithgow

“Television 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.”

“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

“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

“If you can’t run, you crawl. If you can’t crawl– you find someone to carry you.” – Joss Whedon

“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

“Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It’s bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back.” – Michael Crichton, Airframe

“They say that ninety percent of TV is junk. But, ninety percent of everything is junk.” – Gene Roddenberry

“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.” – John Lennon

“Do you know we are being led to slaughters by placid admirals & that fat slow generals are getting obscene on young blood. Do you know we are ruled by t.v” – Jim Morrison, An American Prayer

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

“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. ” – Neil Postman

“Television is a medium because anything well done is rare.” – Fred Allen

“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

“Gore Vidal, for instance, once languidly told me that one should never miss a chance either to have sex or to appear on television. My efforts to live up to this maxim have mainly resulted in my passing many unglamorous hours on off-peak cable TV. It was actually Vidal’s great foe William F. Buckley who launched my part-time television career, by inviting me on to Firing Line when I was still quite young, and giving me one of the American Right’s less towering intellects as my foil. The response to the show made my day, and then my week. Yet almost every time I go to a TV studio, I feel faintly guilty. This is pre-eminently the ‘soft’ world of dream and illusion and ‘perception’: it has only a surrogate relationship to the ‘hard’ world of printed words and written-down concepts to which I’ve tried to dedicate my life, and that surrogate relationship, while it, too, may be ‘verbal,’ consists of being glib rather than fluent, fast rather than quick, sharp rather than pointed. It means reveling in the fact that I have a meretricious, want-it-both-ways side. My only excuse is to say that at least I do not pretend that this is not so.” – Christopher Hitchens, Hitch 22: A Memoir

“Calvin:”It says here that ‘religion is the opiate of the masses.’…what do you suppose that means?” Television: “…it means that Karl Marx hadn’t seen anything yet” – Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes: Sunday Pages 1985-1995: An Exhibition Catalogue

“When I got my first television set I stopped caring so much about close relationships.” – Andy Warhol

“You cannot blame 18R movies. When I was young, I used to come out to Gilligan’s Island.” – Ron Jeremy

“What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.” – W. H. Auden, The Dyer’s Hand

“I haven’t had a TV in 10 years, and I really don’t miss it. ‘Cause it’s always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.” – Chuck Palahniuk

“Television is a device that permits people who haven’t anything to do to watch people who can’t do anything.” – Fred Allen

“Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.” – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

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

“Personality begins where comparison leaves off. Be unique. Be memorable. Be confident. Be proud.” – Shannon L. Alder

“Some stories have to be written because no one would believe the absurdity of it all.” – Shannon L. Alder

“If you were born with the ability to change someone’s perspective or emotions, never waste that gift. It is one of the most powerful gifts God can give—the ability to influence.” – Shannon L. Alder

“If you miss the news for a day, you miss everything. If you miss the news for a year, you don’t miss anything.” – Jay Leno

“Do you realize if it weren’t for Edison we’d be watching TV by candlelight?” – Al Boliska

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

“I feel guilty because for a long time I didn’t allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon.” – Donald Miller, Blue Like Jazz: Nonreligious Thoughts on Christian Spirituality

“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.” – Alfred Hitchcock

“98% 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

“Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.” – Bill Hicks

“Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.” – Gore Vidal

“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.”

“Cable TV is now evenly divided between shows about preparing food and shows about losing weight.” – Andy Borowitz

“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

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

“If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.” – Edward R. Murrow

“If television’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.” – Dorothy Gambrell, Cat and Girl Volume I

“Fox News gives you both sides of every story: The President’s side, and the Vice-President’s side.” – Stephen Colbert

“I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.” – Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

“TV sounds are all the same; there’s no difference between the sound of the wind in Northern Ireland and the wind on a Polynesian island.” – Ryu Murakami, Coin Locker Babies

“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

“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

“Kill your television!” – Paul Thomas Anderson, Magnolia: The Shooting Script

“If TV were only an invention to broadcast soccer, it would be justified.” – Roberto Fontanarrosa

“Television characters live inside our minds as though they’re actual people. In fact, we know more about them than we do about most people in our physical lives.” – Neal Pollack

“The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force.” – Michael Parenti, Against Empire

“Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD.” – Jeff Lindsay, Dexter in the Dark

“So long as there’s a jingle in your head, television isn’t free.” – Jason Love

“People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.” – Jess C. Scott, Literary Heroin (Gluttony): A Twilight Parody

“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

“The serious reader in the age of technology is a rebel by definition: a protester without a placard, a Luddite without hammer or bludgeon. She reads on planes to picket the antiseptic nature of modern travel, on commuter trains to insist on individualism in the midst of the herd, in hotel rooms to boycott the circumstances that separate her from her usual sources of comfort and stimulation, during office breaks to escape from the banal conversation of office mates, and at home to revolt against the pervasive and mind-deadening irrelevance of television.” – Eric Burns, The Joy of Books

“Personally, I believe “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. I’d rather use film cameras and vinyl records and cathode ray tubes than any sort of the digital technology available. Look around! The streets are full of people who would rather have their eyes on their cell phones than on the world around them! Scientists are researching technology to erase specific memories from people! Our thrown-away digital technology is showing up overseas in huge piles of toxic heavy metals and plastic! And yet there are still people who keep wanting technology and the future to keep going. They dream of flying cars, or humanoid robots, of populated cities on Mars. But do we really NEED this stuff? Maybe before we try to keep turning our world into an episode of The Jetsons, we should focus more on the problems that are surprisingly being overlooked now more than ever. Before we design another stupid cell phone or build a flying car, let’s put a stop to racism, to sexism, to homophobia, to war. Let’s stop buying all our “American” products from sweat shops overseas and let’s end poverty in third-world countries. Let’s let film photography never go obsolete, let’s let print books continue to be printed. Let’s stop domestic violence and child abuse and prostitution and this world’s heavy reliance on prescription drugs. Let’s stop terrorism, let’s stop animal cruelty, , let’s stop overpopulation and urbanization, let’s stop the manufacture of nuclear weapons.. I mean come on, we have all these problems to solve, but digital tech enthusiasts are more concerned that we don’t have flying cars or robotic maids yet? That’s pathetic.” – Rebecca McNutt

“If it weren’t for Philo T. Farnsworth, inventor of television, we’d still be eating frozen radio dinners.” – Johnny Carson

“The television is ‘real’. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’.” – Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“I should go so far as to say that embedded in the surrealistic frame of a television news show is a theory of anticommunication, featuring a type of discourse that abandons logic, reason, sequence and rules of contradiction. In aesthetics, I believe the name given to this theory is Dadaism; in philosophy, nihilism; in psychiatry, schizophrenia. In the parlance of the theater, it is known as vaudeville.” – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“Every day’s a negotiation and sometimes it’s done with guns.” – Joss Whedon

“If the television craze continues with the present level of programs, we are destined to have a nation of morons.” – Daniel Marsh Techradar.com

“Hey, Geekoid!” yelled Duncan Dougal, “Why do you read so much? Don’t you know how to watch TV?” – Bruce Coville, My Teacher Is an Alien

“This readiness to assume the guilt for the threats to our environment is deceptively reassuring: We like to be guilty since, if we are guilty, it all depends on us. We pull the strings of the catastrophe, so we can also save ourselves simply by changing our lives. What is really hard for us (at least in the West) to accept is that we are reduced to the role of a passive observer who sits and watches what our fate will be. To avoid this impotence, we engage in frantic, obsessive activities. We recycle old paper, we buy organic food, we install long-lasting light bulbs—whatever—just so we can be sure that we are doing something. We make our individual contribution like the soccer fan who supports his team in front of a TV screen at home, shouting and jumping from his seat, in the belief that this will somehow influence the game’s outcome.” – Slavoj Žižek

“I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers.” – John Twelve Hawks, The Traveler

“I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.” – Orson Welles

“Radio news is bearable. This is due to the fact that while the news is being broadcast, the disk jockey is not allowed to talk.” – Fran Lebowitz

“The triumph of machine over people.” – Fred Allen

“Pettiness often leads both to error and to the digging of a trap for oneself. Wondering (which I am sure he didn’t) ‘if by the 1990s [Hitchens] was morphing into someone I didn’t quite recognize”, Blumenthal recalls with horror the night that I ‘gave’ a farewell party for Martin Walker of the Guardian, and then didn’t attend it because I wanted to be on television instead. This is easy: Martin had asked to use the fine lobby of my building for a farewell bash, and I’d set it up. People have quite often asked me to do that. My wife did the honors after Nightline told me that I’d have to come to New York if I wanted to abuse Mother Teresa and Princess Diana on the same show. Of all the people I know, Martin Walker and Sidney Blumenthal would have been the top two in recognizing that journalism and argument come first, and that there can be no hard feelings about it. How do I know this? Well, I have known Martin since Oxford. (He produced a book on Clinton, published in America as ‘The President We Deserve’. He reprinted it in London, under the title, ‘The President They Deserve’. I doffed my hat to that.) While Sidney—I can barely believe I am telling you this—once also solicited an invitation to hold his book party at my home. A few days later he called me back, to tell me that Martin Peretz, owner of the New Republic, had insisted on giving the party instead. I said, fine, no bones broken; no caterers ordered as yet. ‘I don’t think you quite get it,’ he went on, after an honorable pause. ‘That means you can’t come to the party at all.’ I knew that about my old foe Peretz: I didn’t then know I knew it about Blumenthal. I also thought that it was just within the limit of the rules. I ask you to believe that I had buried this memory until this book came out, but also to believe that I won’t be slandered and won’t refrain—if motives or conduct are in question—from speculating about them in my turn.” – Christopher Hitchens

“El problema es que el niño es una esponja que registra y absorbe indiscriminadamente todo lo que ve […] El niño formado en la imagen se reduce a ser un hombre que no lee, y, por lo tanto, la mayoría de las veces, es un ser «reblandecido por la televisión», adicto de por vida a los videojuegos.” – Giovanni Sartori, Homo videns: La sociedad teledirigida

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

“Television’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 says 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

“Television! Teacher, mother, secret lover.” – Homer Simpson, The Simpsons

“Television is an anesthetic for the pain of the modern world.” – Astrid Alauda

“We must, together as a nation, stop watching Fox.” – Jon Steward

“An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. ” – Dan Rather

“A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis.” – Umberto Eco, The Screen Education Reader: Cinema, Television, Culture

“I cannot tell you how many quiet mornings I have spent sitting around hotel rooms and furnished apartments in the United States and Mexico, smoking cigarettes, plunking the guitar, and watching Perry Mason–telling myself, “Well, at least I don’t have a day job. And there is nothing wrong with that. I am not guilty of anything. Perry would see that in a minute.” – Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy

“I turned up the brightness control on my TV but it didn’t work. The show got even dumber.” – Greg Tamblyn

“Imagine what it would be like if TV were actually good. It would be the end of everything we know.” – Marvin Minsky

“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

“My father hated radio and could not wait for television to be invented so he could hate that too.” – Peter De Vries

“In honor of Oprah Winfrey: Even greater than the ability to inspire others with hope is the power to motivate them to give as much to the lives of others as they would give to their own; and to empower them to confront the worst in themselves in order to discover and claim the best in themselves.” – Aberjhani, Journey through the Power of the Rainbow: Quotations from a Life Made Out of Poetry

“All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?” – Nicholas Johnson

“If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.” – Umberto Eco

“On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead.” – Stephen Chbosky, The Perks of Being a Wallflower

“Television is simply automated day-dreaming.” – Lee Lovinger

“If you have to get your news from TV, get it from the Comedy Channel. It’s just as accurate, with the added benefit of making you forget your Prozac for a few minutes.” – Greg Tamblyn

“Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.” – Jean Baudrillard

“Watching too much TV can triple our hunger for more possessions, while reducing our personal contentment by about 5 percent for every hour a day we watch.” – David Niven

“Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It’s how I feel after a good dinner. That’s why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That’s something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. ” – Tara Bray Smith

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” – Groucho Marx

“Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.” – Radiohead

“Americans may say they love our accents (I have been accused of sounding ‘like Princess Di’) but the more thoughtful ones resent and rather dislike us as a nation and people, as friends of mine have found out by being on the edge of conversations where Americans assumed no Englishmen were listening. And it is the English, specifically, who are the targets of this. Few Americans have heard of Wales. All of them have heard of Ireland and many of them think they are Irish. Scotland gets a sort of free pass, especially since Braveheart re-established the Scots’ anti-English credentials among the ignorant millions who get their history off the TV.” – Peter Hitchens

“When I was your age I knew how to listen to television and learn a few things.” – Lewis Nordan, The All-Girl Football Team

“I must say I find television very educational. The minute somebody turns it on, I go into the library and read a good book.” – Groucho Marx

“In this image-driven age, wildlife filmmakers carry a heavy responsibility. They can influence how we think and behave when we’re in nature. They can even influence how we raise our kids, how we vote and volunteer in our communities, as well as the future of our wildlands and wildlife. If the stories they create are misleading or false in some way, viewers will misunderstand the issues and react in inappropriate ways. People who consume a heavy diet of wildlife films filled with staged violence and aggression, for example, are likely to think about nature as a circus or a freak show. They certainly won’t form the same positive connections to the natural world as people who watch more thoughtful, authentic, and conservation-oriented films.” – Chris Palmer, Shooting in the Wild: An Insider’s Account of Making Movies in the Animal Kingdom

“Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.” – Robert MacNeil

“Today, watching television often means fighting, violence and foul language – and that’s just deciding who gets to hold the remote control.” – Donna Gephart

“So please, oh please, we beg, we pray, Go throw your TV set away, And in its place you can install A lovely bookshelf on the wall. Then fill the shelves with lots of books.” – Roald Dahl, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

“I may have made a lot of bad decisions in life, but at least I don’t watch daytime television.” – Andy Borowitz

“Theater is life. Cinema is art. Television is furniture.” TV Facts

“Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn’t have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.” – Daniel Ehrenhaft, The Last Dog on Earth

“The problem with our society is that our values aren’t in the right place. There’s an awful lot of bleeding and naked bodies on prime-time networks, but not nearly enough cable television on public programming.” – Bauvard, Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic

“I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that’s it, that’ll be me, you know, that’ll be me.” – Nick Cave

“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information–misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information–information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” – Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

“People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don’t like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.” – Joss Whedon

“Television has changed a child from an irresistible force to an immovable object.” – Anonymous

“Let us all bask in television’s warm glowing warming glow.” – Homer Simpson

“Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.” – David Foster Wallace

“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

“It’s the menace that everyone loves to hate but can’t seem to live without.” – Paddy Chayevsky

“If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.” – Erma Bombeck

“Television: A medium – so called because it is neither rare nor well done.” – Ernie Kovacs

“If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?” – Warren Ellis

“Time has convinced me of one thing. Television is for appearing on, not looking at.” – Noel Coward

“…pwede nga ring yung TV ang may sumpa. dahil ang TV, para ring drugs, pero ligal. isipin mo, bakit isa ito sa mga unang-unang ipinupundar ng mga Pilipino kahit gaano sila kahirap? kasi malaking tulong ang telebisyon para lumimot. para tumakas sa realidad. kahit mag-isa ka lang sa bahay, nababawasan ang lungkot kung may TV. nakakatanggal-buryong kung wala kang trabaho. mas entertaining kesa sa diyaryo, at mas accessible kesa sa sine. pwede rin itong tagapag-alaga ng mga anak mo. pwedeng ulam kung sakto lang ang budget pambili ng ng bigas. at pwedeng bintana kung parang bartolina lang ang tirahang tinutulugan ng mag-anak mo, dahil may magaganda itong lugar at magagandang tao. kumpleto sa sayawan, kantahan, tawanan, pantasya, at boksing. burado ang mga suliranin mo. pag sinuswerte ka, pwede ka pang manalo.” – Bob Ong, Lumayo Ka Nga Sa Akin

“One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.” – Kurt Vonnegut

“We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that’s show business.” – Edward R. Murrow

“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

“Local TV news finds the stupidest person they can, and if that person understands the story, they don’t use it.” – Dave Barry

“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

“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

“…and he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within.” – Hubert Selby Jr., Requiem for a Dream

“I don’t think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don’t think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that’s what he means he’s quite right. I’m not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I’m going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I’m just acting the role of a tired non-conformist.” – Rod Serling

“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

“Imitation is the sincerest form of television.” – Fred Allen

“There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it’s not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren’t born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at.” – David Mitchell, Ghostwritten

“It’s been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they’d win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television? By all means let’s be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” – Richard Dawkins