Quotes about radio

A collection of quotes on the topic of radio, people, likeness, use.

Quotes about radio

Jerry Seinfeld photo
John Kricfalusi photo
Albert Einstein photo

“You see, wire telegraph is a kind of a very, very long cat. You pull his tail in New York and his head is meowing in Los Angeles. Do you understand this? And radio operates exactly the same way: you send signals here, they receive them there. The only difference is that there is no cat.”

Albert Einstein (1879–1955) German-born physicist and founder of the theory of relativity

Earliest published version found on Google Books with this phrasing is in the 1993 book The Internet Companion: A Beginner's Guide to Global Networking by Tracy L. LaQuey and Jeanne C. Ryer, p. 25 http://books.google.com/books?id=sP5SAAAAMAAJ&q=meowing#search_anchor. However, the quote seems to have been circulating on the internet earlier than this, appearing for example in this post from 1987 http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.c/msg/cc89abb5e065d23f?hl=en and this one from 1985 http://groups.google.com/group/net.sources.games/browse_thread/thread/846af15b5a38c35/3d6d5a639c24bba3. No reference has been found that cites a source in Einstein's original writings, and the quote appears to be a variation of an old joke that dates at least as far back as 1866, as discussed in this entry from the "Quote Investigator" blog http://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/02/24/telegraph-cat/#more-3387. A variant was told by Thomas Edison, appearing in The Diary and Sundry Observations of Thomas Alva Edison (1948), p. 216 http://books.google.com/books?id=NXtEAAAAIAAJ&q=edinburgh#search_anchor: "When I was a little boy, persistently trying to find out how the telegraph worked and why, the best explanation I ever got was from an old Scotch line repairer who said that if you had a dog like a dachshund long enough to reach from Edinburgh to London, if you pulled his tail in Edinburgh he would bark in London. I could understand that. But it was hard to get at what it was that went through the dog or over the wire." A variant of Edison's comment can be found in the 1910 book Edison, His Life and Inventions, Volume 1 by Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin, p. 53 http://books.google.com/books?id=qN83AAAAMAAJ&pg=PA53#v=onepage&q&f=false.
The wireless telegraph is not difficult to understand. The ordinary telegraph is like a very long cat. You pull the tail in New York, and it meows in Los Angles. The wireless is the same, only without the cat.
Variant, earliest known published version is How to Think Like Einstein by Scott Thorpe (2000), p. 61 http://books.google.com/books?id=9yrYQxBgIYEC&lpg=PP1&pg=PA61#v=onepage&q&f=false. Appeared on the internet before that, as in this archived page from 12 October 1999 http://web.archive.org/web/19991012152820/http://stripe.colorado.edu/%7Ejudy/einstein/advice.html
Misattributed

Josip Broz Tito photo
Anne Frank photo

“Ordinary people simply don't know what books mean to us, shut up here. Reading, learning, and the radio are our amusements.”

Anne Frank (1929–1945) victim of the Holocaust and author of a diary

Source: The Diary of a Young Girl

Jesse Owens photo
Lady Gaga photo
James Blunt photo
Ian McCulloch photo
Otto Dix photo

“RADIO – DADA DIX whose monumental painting 'Barricade' [now lost] created such a sensation in Dresden”

Otto Dix (1891–1969) German painter and printmaker

from a photo of Otto Dix c. 1920; with text written by himself with crayon on the wall behind him - in standing pose for the photographer; printed in 'Education resource material: beauty, truth and goodness in Dix's War' https://nga.gov.au/dix/edu.pdf, p. 8

Theodor W. Adorno photo
Gabriel Marcel photo
Ozzy Osbourne photo
Robert Smith (musician) photo
Gabriel Marcel photo
Jesse Owens photo

“Mr. Hitler had to leave the stadium early, but after winning I hurried up to the radio booth. When I passed near the Chancellor he arose, waved his hand at me and I waved back at him.”

Jesse Owens (1913–1980) American track and field athlete

Quoted in "Owens, Back, Gets Hearty Reception" by Louis Effrat, The New York Times, 25 August 1936, p.25 http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive/pdf?res=940CEFDC1E30E13BBC4D51DFBE66838D629EDE.
1930s

Jean-François Revel photo
Mordechai Anielewicz photo
Charles Bukowski photo
Douglas Adams photo

“Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies — what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?”

Douglas Adams (1952–2001) English writer and humorist

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Future (2001)
Context: It's important to remember that the relationship between different media tends to be complementary. When new media arrive they don't necessarily replace or eradicate previous types. Though we should perhaps observe a half second silence for the eight-track. — There that's done. What usually happens is that older media have to shuffle about a bit to make space for the new one and its particular advantages. Radio did not kill books and television did not kill radio or movies — what television did kill was cinema newsreel. TV does it much better because it can deliver it instantly. Who wants last week's news?

Albert Schweitzer photo

“We learn of these things from the radio or newspapers and we judge them according to whether they signify success for the group of peoples to which we belong, or for our enemies. When we do admit to ourselves that such acts are the results of inhuman conduct, our admission is accompanied by the thought that the very fact of war itself leaves us no option but to accept them. In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.”

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) French-German physician, theologian, musician and philosopher

The Problem of Peace (1954)
Context: We have learned to tolerate the facts of war: that men are killed en masse — some twenty million in the Second World War — that whole cities and their inhabitants are annihilated by the atomic bomb, that men are turned into living torches by incendiary bombs. We learn of these things from the radio or newspapers and we judge them according to whether they signify success for the group of peoples to which we belong, or for our enemies. When we do admit to ourselves that such acts are the results of inhuman conduct, our admission is accompanied by the thought that the very fact of war itself leaves us no option but to accept them. In resigning ourselves to our fate without a struggle, we are guilty of inhumanity.

Sylvia Plath photo
Jeffrey Eugenides photo
Jenny Offill photo
Henry Miller photo

“You use your brain much as you would use a radio crystal; you tune in different frequencies.”

Be Who You Want, Have What You Want: Change Your Thinking, Change Your Life

Jonathan Safran Foer photo
Lee Child photo
Arundhati Roy photo
Zelda Fitzgerald photo
Kelley Armstrong photo
Chuck Palahniuk photo
Rodney Dangerfield photo
Kathy Reichs photo
Haruki Murakami photo
Jim Butcher photo
Marilyn Monroe photo

“It's not true that I had nothing on. I had the radio on.”

Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) American actress, model, and singer

As quoted in TIME magazine when "asked if she really had nothing on in the photograph [for a 1949 calendar]" ("Something for the Boys." Time 60, no. 6 (August 11, 1952): 90)
Variant: I had the radio on.

Stephen King photo

“Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand.”

Page 1087
Source: It (1986)
Context: Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question...So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away...drive away from Derry, from memory...but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.
Context: So you leave, and there is an urge to look back, to look back just once as the sunset fades, to see that severe New England skyline one final time... Best not to look back. Best to believe that there will be happily ever afters all the way around - and so there may be; who is to say there will not be such endings? Not all boats which sail away into darkness never find the sun again, or the hand of another child; if life teaches anything at all, it teaches that there are so many happy endings that the man who believes there is no God needs his rationality called into serious question... So drive away quick, drive away while the last of the light slips away... drive away from Derry, from memory... but not from desire. That stays, the bright cameo of all we were and all we believed as children, all that shone in our eyes even when we were lost and the wind blew in the night. Drive away and try to keep smiling. Get a little rock and roll on the radio and go toward all the life there is with all the courage you can find and all the belief you can muster. Be true, be brave, stand. All the rest is darkness.

Matt Taibbi photo
Richard Nixon photo

“Well, then, some of you will say, and rightly, "Well, what did you use the fund for, Senator? Why did you have to have it?" Let me tell you in just a word how a Senate office operates. First of all, a Senator gets $15,000 a year in salary. He gets enough money to pay for one trip a year, a round trip, that is, for himself, and his family between his home and Washington, DC. And then he gets an allowance to handle the people that work in his office to handle his mail. And the allowance for my State of California, is enough to hire 13 people. And let me say, incidentally, that that allowance is not paid to the Senator. It is paid directly to the individuals that the Senator puts on his payroll. But all of these people and all of these allowances are for strictly official business; business, for example, when a constituent writes in and wants you to go down to the Veteran's Administration and get some information about his GI policy — items of that type, for example. But there are other expenses that are not covered by the Government. And I think I can best discuss those expenses by asking you some questions.Do you think that when I or any other senator makes a political speech, has it printed, should charge the printing of that speech and the mailing of that speech to the taxpayers? Do you think, for example, when I or any other Senator makes a trip to his home State to make a purely political speech that the cost of that trip should be charged to the taxpayers? Do you think when a Senator makes political broadcasts or political television broadcasts, radio or television, that the expense of those broadcasts should be charged to the taxpayers? Well I know what your answer is. It's the same answer that audiences give me whenever I discuss this particular problem: The answer is no. The taxpayers shouldn't be required to finance items which are not official business but which are primarily political business.”

Richard Nixon (1913–1994) 37th President of the United States of America

1950s, Checkers speech (1952)

Harlan Ellison photo
Sri Aurobindo photo
Mark Heard photo
James A. Michener photo
Milton Friedman photo
Tamsin Greig photo

“It's interesting to see the dislocation between how people perceive a person visually. Apparently on the radio I'm blonde with a big arse.”

Tamsin Greig (1966) English actress

About what people thought her Archers character Debbie Aldridge looked like.
From an interview with the Telegraph, "Seriously funny."

Tina Fey photo
Max Boot photo
Georges Duhamel photo
David Lee Roth photo
Everett Dean Martin photo

“I was a born club comic. Radio and TV and stage were fine, but I found my real home in cabaret.”

Bob Monkhouse (1928–2003) English entertainer

Obituary in The Independent http://web.archive.org/web/20100507114758/http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/bob-monkhouse-549171.html

Orson Welles photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“The message of radio is one of violent, unified implosion and resonance.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 263

Stephen King photo
Eric Hobsbawm photo
William S. Burroughs photo
Phil Liggett photo
Roger Waters photo

“"The Powers That Be" on Radio KAOS (Roger Waters, 1987)”

Roger Waters (1943) English songwriter, bassist, and lyricist of Pink Floyd

Variant: "Me Or Him" on Radio KAOS (Roger Waters, 1987)

Louis Althusser photo
Martin Luther King, Jr. photo

“And I say to you this morning in conclusion that I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in things. I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in gadgets and contrivances. As a young man with most of my life ahead of me, I decided early to give my life to something eternal and absolute. Not to these little gods that are here today and gone tomorrow, but to God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Not in the little gods that can be with us in a few moments of prosperity, but in the God who walks with us through the valley of the shadow of death, and causes us to fear no evil. That's the God. Not in the god that can give us a few Cadillac cars and Buick convertibles, as nice as they are, that are in style today and out of style three years from now, but the God who threw up the stars to bedeck the heavens like swinging lanterns of eternity. Not in the god that can throw up a few skyscraping buildings, but the God who threw up the gigantic mountains, kissing the sky, as if to bathe their peaks in the lofty blues. Not in the god that can give us a few televisions and radios, but the God who threw up that great cosmic light that gets up early in the morning in the eastern horizon, (who paints its technicolor across the blue—something that man could never make. I'm not going to put my ultimate faith in the little gods that can be destroyed in an atomic age, but the God who has been our help in ages past, and our hope for years to come, and our shelter in the time of storm, and our eternal home. That's the God that I'm putting my ultimate faith in.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Rediscovering Lost Values (1954)

“Europe has a press that stresses opinions; America a press, radio, and television that emphasize news.”

James Reston (1909–1995) Journalist, newspaper editor

The President and the Press, The Artillery of the Press (1966)

Fran Lebowitz photo

“Radio news is bearable. This is due to the fact that while the news is being broadcast the disc jockey is not allowed to talk.”

"No News is Preferable" ( p. 221 http://books.google.com/books?id=wKnCCIk9O0wC&q=%22Radio+news+is+bearable+This+is+due+to+the+fact+that+while+the+news+is+being+broadcast+the+disc+jockey+is+not+allowed+to+talk%22&pg=PA221#v=onepage)
Originally published in "The Lebowitz Report" http://books.google.com/books?id=k_MxAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Radio+news+is+bearable+This+is+due+to+the+fact+that+while+the+news+is+being+broadcast+the+disc+jockey+is+not+allowed+to+talk%22&pg=PA209#v=onepage column in Mademoiselle (1975)
Metropolitan Life (1978)

Johnny Mercer photo

“I know all the songs that the cowboys know
'bout the big corral where the doggies go,
'Cause I learned them all on the radio.
Yippie yi yo kayah”

Johnny Mercer (1909–1976) American lyricist, songwriter, singer and music professional

Song I'm an old Cowhand

Regina Spektor photo

“On the radio
We heard November Rain
That solo's awful long
But it's a good refrain”

Regina Spektor (1980) American singer-songwriter and pianist

"On the Radio"
Begin to Hope (2006)

Jacques Ellul photo
Cesare Pavese photo
Kent Hovind photo
Charlie Brooker photo

“The FM channels are as popular as TV. People are hooked to the radio all day. So, when the same medium strongly publicises the piece, people are bound to keep listening to it.”

Arin Paul (1980) Indian film director

Interview on Indian Express http://www.indianexpress.com/news/morning-raga/518584/2 (2009)

Philip Roth photo

“Each year she taught him the names of the flowers in her language and in his, and from one year to the next he could not even remember the English. For nearly thirty years Sabbath had been exiled in these mountains, and still he could name hardly anything. They didn't have this stuff where he came from. All these things growing were beside the point there. He was from the shore. There was sand and ocean, horizon and sky, daytime and nighttime - the light, the dark, the tide, the stars, the boats, the sun, the mists, the gulls. There were the jetties, the piers, the boardwalk, the booming, silent, limitless sea. Where he grew up they had the Atlantic. You could touch with your toes where America began. They lived in a stucco bungalow two short streets from the edge of America. The house. The porch. The screens. The icebox. The tub. The linoleum. The broom. The pantry. The ants. The sofa. The radio. The garage. The outside shower with the slatted wooden floor Morty had built and the drain that always clogged. In summer, the salty sea breeze and the dazling light; in September, the hurricanes; in January, the storms. They had January, February, March, April, May, June, July, August, September, November, December. And then January. And then again January, no end to the stockpile of Januaries, of Mays, of Marches. August, December, April - name a month, and they had it in spades. They'd had endlessness. He had grown up on endlessness and his mother - in the beginning they were the same thing. His mother, his mother, his mother, his mother, his mother… and then there was his mother, his father, Grandma, Morty, and the Atlantic at the end of the street. The ocean, the beach, the first two streets in America, then the house, and in the house a mother who never stopped whistlîg until December 1944. If Morty had come alive, if the endlessness had ended naturally instead of with the telegram, if after the war Morty had started doing electrical work and plumbing for people, had become a builder at the shore, gone into the construction business just as the boom in Monmouth County was beginning…Didn't matter. Take your pick. Get betrayed by the fantasy of endlessness or by the fact of finitude. No, Sabbath could only have wound up Sabbath, begging for what he was begging, bound to what he was bound, saying what he did not wish to stop himself from saying.”

Sabbath's Theater (1995)

Howard S. Becker photo
Gertrude Stein photo
David Lee Roth photo

“What I do is dangerous for sponsors, dangerous for editors. But I'm really a radio kid. I grew up on radio, not TV. Ultimately, I'll probably do radio.”

David Lee Roth (1954) Rock vocalist; lead singer with Van Halen

Chuck Darrow (May 30, 2003) "'Diamond Dave' rehashes old tunes to new beats", Courier-Post, p. 22S.

Tomas Kalnoky photo
Georges Duhamel photo

“For many people in the future, radio will take the place of an inner life.”

Georges Duhamel (1884–1966) French writer

Source: Défense des Lettres [In Defense of Letters] (1937), p. 35

Louis-ferdinand Céline photo
Robert Fisk photo

“Terrorism' is a word that has become a plague on our vocabulary, the excuse and reason and moral permit for state-sponsored violence - our violence - which is now used on the innocent of the Middle East ever more outrageously and promiscuously. Terrorism, terrorism, terrorism. It has become a full stop, a punctuation mark, a phrase, a speech, a sermon, the be-all and end-all of everything that we must hate in order to ignore injustice and occupation and murder on a mass scale. Terror, terror, terror, terror. It is a sonata, a symphony, an orchestra tuned to every television and radio station and news agency report, the soap-opera of the Devil, served up on prime-time or distilled in wearyingly dull and mendacious form by the right-wing 'commentators' of the America east coast or the Jerusalem Post or the intellectuals of Europe. Strike against Terror. Victory over Terror. War on Terror. Everlasting War on Terror. Rarely in history have soldiers and journalists and presidents and kings aligned themselves in such thoughtless, unquestioning ranks. In August 1914, the soldiers thought they would be home by Christmas. Today, we are fighting for ever. The war is eternal. The enemy is eternal, his face changing on our screens. Once he lived in Cairo and sported a moustache and nationalised the Suez Canal. Then he lived in Tripoli and wore a ridiculous military uniform and helped the IRA and bombed American bars in Berlin. Then he wore a Muslim Imam's gown and ate yoghurt in Tehran and planned Islamic revolution. Then he wore a white gown and lived in a cave in Afghanistan and then he wore another silly moustache and resided in a series of palaces around Baghdad. Terror, terror, terror. Finally, he wore a kuffiah headdress and outdated Soviet-style military fatigues, his name was Yassir Arafat, and he was the master of world terror and then a super-statesman and then again, a master of terror, linked by Israeli enemies to the terror-Meister of them all, the one who lived in the Afghan cave.”

Robert Fisk (1946) English writer and journalist

The Great War for Civilization (2005)

“I'm tired of Republican-Democrat politics. I'm tired of blowhard radio people, blowhard television people, blowhard newspapers. They can take the job and shove it. I come from a blue collar background, and I am trying to do the right thing. And that's where I'm going with this.”

Roy McDonald (politician) (1947) American politician

Reported in Lucian McCarty, "Sen. Roy McDonald Comes to his decision on the same-sex marriage measure after careful consideration, remains firm in his support despite criticism", The Saratogian (June 2011).
On the subject of political parties and his blurring of the two.

Glenn Beck photo

“Let me tell you this: They shut me down on radio, that's fine, I'll do TV. They shut me down on TV, that's fine, I'll do Internet. They shut me down on the Internet, that's fine, I'll do stage shows. They shut me down on stage shows, that's fine, I'll go door to door. You will have to shoot me in the head. We are not stopping.”

Glenn Beck (1964) U.S. talk radio and television host

The Glenn Beck Program
Premiere Radio Networks
2010-05-18
After attacking Media Matters, Beck says: "You will have to shoot me in the head. We are not stopping"
2010-05-18
Media Matters for America
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/201005180014
2010s, 2010

GG Allin photo
Tamsin Greig photo
Willie Nelson photo
Carl Sagan photo
Ani DiFranco photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“Radio provides a speed-up of information that also causes acceleration in other media. It certainly contracts the world to village size and creates insatiable village tastes for gossip, rumour, and personal malice.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

Source: 1960s, Understanding Media (1964), p. 24

Lee Kuan Yew photo
Marshall McLuhan photo

“We are no more prepared to encounter radio and TV in our literate milieu than the native of Ghana is able to cope with the literacy that takes him out of his collective tribal world and beaches him in individual isolation.”

Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980) Canadian educator, philosopher, and scholar-- a professor of English literature, a literary critic, and a …

xx
1960s, Understanding Media (1964)