Quotes about television
page 6

“Gordon Strachan is as he is. He can be a prickly character to interview. I just think that, just occasionally, we all need to take a step back. This isn’t done for a national audience or for national television - this is the opportunity the manager has to speak to supporters of his club. If that’s how you want to address fans it is entirely Strachan’s responsibility, but I think he needs to revisit that a bit.”

Gordon Strachan (1957) Scottish footballer and manager

Alastair Brownlee, Evening Gazette, Oct 5 2010 http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/news/teesside-news/2010/10/05/strachan-s-words-too-much-for-boro-fans-84229-27404292/ About

Support, Thinking

“If you have never been to a live show of mine, then expect almost a full hour of great songs interspersed with hilarious anecdotes about my career, and lengthy clips from my embarrassingly successful channel 4 television shows.”

Derren Brown (1971) British illusionist

TV recordings of stage shows, Derren Brown – Enigma (2011), Derren Brown – Enigma tour brochure

Success

“I am not a fan of John McCain because he has done so little for our Veterans and he should know better than anybody what the Veterans need, especially in regards to the VA. He is yet another all talk, no action politician who spends too much time on television and not enough time doing his job and helping the Vets. He is also allowing our military to decrease substantially in size and strength, something which should never be allowed to happen. Furthermore, he was extremely disrespectful to the thousands upon thousands of people, many of whom happen to be his constituents, that came to listen to me speak about illegal immigration in Phoenix last week by calling them "crazies". These were not "crazies"—these were great American citizens. I have great respect for all those who serve in our military including those that weren't captured and are also heroes. I want to strengthen our military and take care of our Veterans. I want to MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN especially for those that serve to protect our freedom. I am fighting for our Veterans!”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2015

People, Freedom, Time, Help

“Ruburt tuned in to the world view of a man known dead. He was not directly in communication with William James. He was aware, however, of the universe through William James' world view. As you might tune into a program on a television set, Ruburt tuned into the view of reality now held in the mind of William James. Because that view necessarily involved emotions, Ruburt felt some sense of emotional contact -- but only with the validity of the emotions. Each person has such a world view, whether living or dead in your terms, and that "living picture" exists despite time or space. It can be perceived by others.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Source: Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book (1976), p. 82-83

World, Communication, Reality, Sense

“But what has struck me most looking at my own constituency in-box as well as the thousands of emails that I’m receiving from the general public here is that it isn’t just the Muslim community that’s reacting to this. It’s a broad swathe of British public opinion that feels deeply disturbed by what it is seeing on its television screens coming out of Gaza.”

Philip Hammond (1955) British Conservative politician

Telegraph article (2014)

Feeling, Communication, Box

“Hello, I'm Charlie Brooker and you're watching Screenwipe, a programme all about television.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Introductory message on every episode of Screenwipe, usually said in an odd way (for example, with Brooker slapping himself as he says it).
Screenwipe

“I watched a rerun on television of a 1960s comedy programme called "Mr Ed", which was about a talking horse. Judging by the quality of the jokes, I would guess that Mr Ed wrote his own material.”

Bill Bryson (1951) American author

The Lost Continent: Travels in Small-Town America (1989)

Horse

“I am not anti-coloured, take it from me; nothing pleases me more than when I arrive at an airport, or a station, or a seaport, and I see a coloured family there — the black father, the black wife and the black children… When I see these families arriving at the airport I am happy, and when I see them leaving at London airport I am happy.
But if there is one thing that gets up my nose, I must admit, it is this — the way… the thing is when I am down in Torquay and I switch on my television and I see one of them reading our news to us. It is our news and they’re reading it to me. If I was a chauvinist I would say I object even to seeing women reading our news to us.
But now we have women reading our news to us. If they could perhaps have their own news which they were reading to us, I suppose [laughter], it would be very interesting.
For the time being, for a transitional period I'd be prepared to accept that the BBC should have a dinner-jacketed gentleman reading the important news to us, following by a lady reading all the less important news, followed by Trevor McDonald giving us all the latest news about the muggings and the drug busts…”

David Irving (1938) British writer and Holocaust denier

David Irving's Talk to the Clarendon Club http://www.fpp.co.uk/speeches/speech190992.html

Women, Children, Family, Way

“(Man on television) Rita, you must believe me, alien beings are among us. (Sylvia) Yeah, in public office.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p. 176

“With both Jeet and Prosenjit venturing into television, things are bound to hot up. We are hoping that things change for better now. It’s a bit like Shah Rukh Khan hosting Kaun Banega Crorepati and Salman Khan hosting Dus ka Dum. The shows have been evidently designed keeping both these star’s image in mind.”

Arin Paul (1980) Indian film director

Interview in Indian Express on Reality Shows http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/clash-of-the-titans/345322/ (2008)

Hope, Star, Change

“In the past decade the distinction between connotation and denotation has been blurred by politics. The definitions of words should not change with every shift in the winds of public sentiment. Our society has already suffered from four decades of Situational Ethics. Heaven help us in this new era of Situational Definitions. A rocket scientist or military engineer can teach you about Sympathetic Detonations, but it is 21st Century television commentators who have introduced us to the era of Sympathetic Denotations. We now live in an Orwellian world where a semi-auto rifle is arbitrarily called an "assault rifle" if it has black plastic furniture, where a standard capacity magazine is called a "high capacity" magazine, where the confiscation and redistribution of wealth is dubbed "fairness." This also a new age when folks who are given free health care, HD televisions, free cell phones, and enough money to be able to afford air conditioning are deemed to be "living in poverty."”

James Wesley Rawles (1960) Survivalist-fiction author and blogger

The fluidity of our language is evidence that America is sliding into oblivion. Hold fast to the true meaning of words and phrases, or we are doomed. Incendiary Words: Of Detonations and Denotations https://survivalblog.com/incendiary_words_of_detonations_and_denotations/ Survivalblog, 27 May 2013

Money, Health, Age, World

“Pen-and-paper role-playing is live theater and computer games are television. People want the convenience and instant gratification of turning on the TV rather than getting dressed up and going out to see a live play. In the same way, the computer is a more immediately accessible way to play games.”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

As quoted in "Dungeon Masters in Cyberspace" in The New York Times (27 February 2006) http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/27/arts/27drag.html?_r=1&oref=slogin&pagewanted=all

People, Way, Game

“As collage technique replaced oil paint, the cathode ray tube will replace the canvas. Someday artists will work with capacitors, resistors, and semiconductors as they work today with brushes, violins and junk. There are 4,000,000 dots per second on one television screen, just think of the variety of images you can get. It's so cool. It's like going to the moon.”

Nam June Paik (1932–2006) American video art pioneer

Manifesto, New York, October 1965, as cited in Jasia Reichardt (1971). The computer in art. p. 95
1960s

Thinking, Painting

“…And tell me what could be more humbling than to be lying in bed at two in the afternoon, without a shower in twelve days; to look across the room you live in and see in the corner a pile of pizza boxes; to be afraid of undrawing the curtains and opening the window, so removed from people so as not to even wonder who would care if you did or if you didn't do this or that; and to find that the day's only scintilla of hope flickers in the moment you reach for the television remote control.”

Zia Haider Rahman British novelist

In The Light of what We Know (2014)

People, Hope, Lying, Box

“The Grand Inquisitor explains that you have to create mysteries because otherwise the common people will be able to understand things. They have to be subordinated so you have to make things look mysterious and complicated. That's the test of the intellectual. It's also good for them: then you're an important person, talking big words which nobody can understand. Sometimes it gets kind of comical, say in post-modern discourse. Especially around Paris, it has become a comic strip, I mean it's all gibberish. But it's very inflated, a lot of television cameras, a lot of posturing. They try to decode it and see what is the actual meaning behind it, things that you could explain to an eight-year old child. There's nothing there. But these are the ways in which contemporary intellectuals, including those on the Left, create great careers for themselves, power for themselves, marginalize people, intimidate people and so on.”

Noam Chomsky (1928) american linguist, philosopher and activist

In Chomsky on Anarchism, 2005.
Quotes 2000s, 2005

People, Way, Understanding, Personality

“(Man on television) The investment firm of Smith Barney: they make money the old-fashioned way--they earn it. (Sylvia) Right. The rest of us pick it off trees in the backyard.”

Nicole Hollander (1939) Cartoonist

Source: Sylvia cartoon strip, p.154

Money, Way, Fashion, Tree

“In televisionland we are all sophisticated enough now to realize that every statistic has an equal and opposite statistic somewhere in the universe. It is not a candidate's favorite statistic per se that engages us, but the assurance with which he can use it.
We are testing the candidates for self-confidence, for "Presidentiality" in statistical bombardment. It doesn't really matter if their statistics be homemade. What settles the business is the cool with which they are dropped.
And so, as the second half hour treads the decimaled path toward the third hour, we become aware of being locked in a tacit conspiracy with the candidates. We know their statistics go to nothing of importance, and they know we know, and we know they know we know.
There is total but unspoken agreement that the "debate," the arguments which are being mustered here, are of only the slightest importance.
As in some primitive ritual, we all agree — candidates and onlookers — to pretend we are involved in a debate, although the real exercise is a test of style and manners. Which of the competitors can better execute the intricate maneuvers prescribed by a largely irrelevant ritual?
This accounts for the curious lack of passion in both performers. Even when Ford accuses Carter of inconsistency, it is done in a flat, emotionless, game-playing style. The delivery has the tuneless ring of an old press release from the Republican National Committee. Just so, when Carter has an opportunity to set pulses pounding by denouncing the Nixon pardon, he dances delicately around the invitation like a maiden skirting a bog.
We judge that both men judge us to be drained of desire for passion in public life, to be looking for Presidents who are cool and noninflammable. They present themselves as passionless technocrats using an English singularly devoid of poetry, metaphor and even coherent forthright declaration.
Caught up in the conspiracy, we watch their coolness with fine technical understanding and, in the final half hour, begin asking each other for technical judgments. How well is Carter exploiting the event to improve our image of him? Is Ford's television manner sufficiently self-confident to make us sense him as "Presidential"?
It is quite extraordinary. Here we are, fully aware that we are being manipulated by image projectionists, yet happily asking ourselves how obligingly we are submitting to the manipulation. It is as though a rat running a maze were more interested in the psychologist's charts on his behavior than in getting the cheese at the goal line.”

Russell Baker (1925–2019) writer and satirst from the United States

"And All of Us So Cool" (p.340)
There's a Country in My Cellar (1990)

Life, Men, Behavior, Exercises

“You learn a lot watching that, because so much of what you do in film and television is technical. You could go to acting class until you're blue in the face, but when it really comes down to it, you'd better have that acting training where so much of what you do is actually technical.”

Tobin Bell (1942) American actor

The Only Tobin Bell Interview You'll Ever Need http://movieline.com/2009/10/16/tobin-bell-interview/ (October 16, 2009)

Learning, Training

“Homo Sapiens wouldn't have made it, and everything would be different! Television would be … you know, Book of the Month club on television would be:
Neanderthal presenter: "And now we have the professor … uh … whaddayou think of this book?"
Neanderthal professor: "Wha' …?"
Presenter: "What do you think of this book, in a critical way?"”

Eddie Izzard (1962) British stand-up comedian, actor and writer

Professor: "It's all right …"
Presenter: "There you have it. It's all right!"
On the consequences if Neanderthals had not become extinct
Sexie (2003)

Books, Way, Thinking

“If you want to get a television today -- I buy thousands of television sets. If I want a television, I would love the buy American-made televisions like they used to have where they had GE and Sylvania and all of the different. Today, it's Samsung, it's LG, it's Sony. We don't make televisions anymore.”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2016, July, This Week Interview (July 30, 2016)

Love

“Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for the people who break them. It counts the destruction of the redwood and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and counts nuclear warheads and armored cars for the police to fight the riots in our cities. It counts Whitman's rifle and Speck's knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children. Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage, neither our wisdom nor our learning, neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country, it measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it can tell us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”

Robert F. Kennedy (1925–1968) American politician and brother of John F. Kennedy

Speech at the University of Kansas at Lawrence http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/RFK-Speeches/Remarks-of-Robert-F-Kennedy-at-the-University-of-Kansas-March-18-1968.aspx (18 March 1968)

Life, Wisdom, Marriage, Children

“Of course after the conference a desperate attempt was made by Mr. Bonham-Carter to show that of course they weren't committed to federation at all. Well I prefer to go by what Mr. Grimond says; I think he's more important. And when he was asked about this question there was no doubt about his answer; it was on television. And the question was [laughter] I see what you mean, I see what you mean. Yes was the question: "But the mood of your conference today was that Europe should be a federal state. Now if we had to choose between a federal Europe and the Commonwealth, this would have to be a choice wouldn't it? You couldn't have the two." And Mr. Grimond replied in these brilliantly clear sentences: "You could have a Commonwealth linked, though not of course a direct political link, you could have a Commonwealth link of other sorts. But of course a federal Europe I think is a very important point. Now the real thing is that if you are going to have a democratic Europe, if you are going to control the running of Europe democratically, you've got to move towards some form of federalism and if anyone says different to that they're really misleading the public." That's one in the eye for Mr. Bonham-Carter. [laughter] Now we must be clear about this, it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent nation-state. I make no apology for repeating it, the end of a thousand years of history. You may say: "All right let it end." But, my goodness, it's a decision that needs a little care and thought. [clapping] And it does mean the end of the Commonwealth; how can one really seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe, which is what federation means, it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations; it is sheer nonsense.”

Hugh Gaitskell (1906–1963) British politician

Labour Party Annual Conference Report 1962, page 159. Speaking against the Liberal Party's policy of British membership of the European Communities, Labour Party Conference, 2 October 1962. See the video clip here http://newsvote.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/the_daily_politics/6967366.stm

History, Idea, Mood, Question

“Douglas-Home: Can you not make me look better than I do on television? I look rather scraggy, like a ghost.
Make-up girl: No.
Douglas-Home: Why not?
Make-up girl: Because you have a head like a skull.
Douglas-Home: Doesn't everyone have a head like a skull?
Make-up girl: No.”

Alec Douglas-Home (1903–1995) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Michael Cockerell, "Live from Number 10", p. 105.
A story told by Douglas-Home about going on television in the 1964 election.
Attributed

Home, Girl

“Television is becoming a collage — there are so many channels that you move through them making a collage yourself. In that sense, everyone sees something a bit different.”

David Hockney (1937) British artist

Interview with Paul Joyce, New York, November 1985, quoted in Hockney on Photography, ed. Wendy Brown (1988)
1980s

Sense

“Like Duchamp's 'ready mades' - manufactured objects which qualified as art because he chose to call them such, the most unremarkable and inappropriate items - a pin, a plastic clothes peg, a television component, a razor blade, a tampon - could be brought within the province of punk (un)fashion… Objects borrowed from the most sordid of contexts found a place in punks' ensembles; lavatory chains were draped in graceful arcs across chests encased in plastic bin liners. Safety pins were taken out of their domestic 'utility' context and worn as gruesome ornaments through the cheek, ear or lip… fragments of school uniform (white bri-nylon shirts, school ties) were symbolically defiled (the shirts covered in graffiti, or fake blood; the ties left undone) and juxtaposed against leather drains or shocking pink mohair tops.”

Dick Hebdidge

Dick Hebdidge (1979). . p.106-12

School, Art, Fashion, Clothes

“I complain about the United States not being Athens. I certainly say we are a very good Roman republic, and the lies are based upon the most advanced techniques of advertising, which is the only art form my country has ever created — the television commercial — and we sell soap and presidents in the same fashion. Once a country is habituated to liars, it takes generations to bring the truth back.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

2010s, "Gore Vidal: The United States of Amnesia" (2013)

Truth, Art, Fashion, Country

“Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.”

Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself

"First Advertisement for Myself"
Advertisements for Myself (1959)

Cheating

“Stop feeling like you don't have power. Stop feeling pathetic and weak. Break out of your television-induced trance. It starts with a war growl. It starts with getting fired up, staring at yourself in the mirror, and showing some teeth, and saying "I'm a human being. I have dignity. I'm gonna resist. I'm gonna start recognizing the propaganda. I'm gonna break free from it. I'm not gonna fight with my family. I'm gonna organize with my family, and realize we're under attack by the social engineers. And I'm not gonna fight with my neighbors. We're gonna organize. Humanity's gonna come together." AAAHHH! YAAAHHH! We know we're under attack! We know it! We're breaking the conditioning! YAAAHHH! RAAAHH! We're coming for ya globalist. Coming for ya! Coming for ya! We know what you're doing! I'm sorry. I just get fired up when I think about what they're doing to us and how I wanna resist them, and how easy they are to defeat.”

Alex Jones (1974) American radio host, author, conspiracy theorist and filmmaker

Alex Jones RANT: "We're Coming for Ya Globalist" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2okLFw9TIEI, July 2011.

War, Family, Feeling, Thinking

“Turn those cameras back there, please, that is so incredible. By the way, what do you think the chances are that this incredible, massive crowd, record-setting is going to be shown on television tonight? 1% or zero? The fake media will say, "President Trump", and you know what this is, "President Trump spoke before a small crowd of boy scouts today."”

Donald J. Trump (1946) 45th President of the United States of America

2010s, 2017, July, 2017 National Scout Jamboree (July 24, 2017)

Way, Boy, Thinking, Chance

“Every time I turn on the television and hear a manager from the lower divisions, they’ve usually got a Scottish accent. I don’t know the reason for that but let’s hope it continues. I like the philosophy of Scottish managers, they’ve always got this will to win and this work ethic, which I believe in.”

George Graham (1944) Scottish footballer

Interview, Sport.co.uk, 14 January 2011

Hope, Time

“The comics medium is a very specialized area of the Arts, home to many rare and talented blooms and flowering imaginations and it breaks my heart to see so many of our best and brightest bowing down to the same market pressures which drive lowest-common-denominator blockbuster movies and television cop shows. Let's see if we can call time on this trend by demanding and creating big, wild comics which stretch our imaginations. Let's make living breathing, sprawling adventures filled with mind-blowing images of things unseen on Earth. Let's make artefacts that are not faux-games or movies but something other, something so rare and strange it might as well be a window into another universe because that's what it is.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

2004
https://web.archive.org/web/20040803000924/http://www.popimage.com/content/grant20041.html Popimage interview
On comics

Art, Home, Imagination, Game

“Because even though there is all this talk about multiculturalism in television and the movie industries, I have yet to see any evidence of it.”

Margaret Cho (1968) American stand-up comedian

From Her Books, I Have Chosen To Stay And Fight, RACISM AND CIVIL RIGHTS

“Here we are at the gates of the great and powerful OZ! And we have come for your children! We are the REAL Politically Incorrect! Our lives are not Charmed! We WORK for a living! When was the last time [network television] admitted we even EXIST? Roseanne? Sanford and Son? Taxi? [disgusted] Jerry Springer! Our young people are NOT Teenage Witches! Nor are they Clueless! Fact is, they neither have NOR WANT ANYTHING in common with Dawson's Creek, Popular or Spoiled White Rich BABIES 90210!”

Jello Biafra (1958) singer and activist

"Become the Media" (Track 10)
Become the Media (2000)

Children, People, Time, Baby

““And then along came Satan’s Eye Itself. Television.” He laughed, as at some fatal irony. “Don’t you hear the evil hum of the word, the knell of Satan? Television! It’s the ruling character of your lives, like the moon must have been for Indians. An oracle, a companion, a signal of the changing seasons. But rather than divine illumination, each night it spews forth Satan’s imagery. Murders, car crashes, mad policemen, perverted strangers! And you lie there decomposing in its flickering, blue-gray light, absorbing His horrid fantasies!””

Lucius Shepard book Green Eyes

Source: Green Eyes (1984), Chapter 10, p. 115

Lie, Cars, Light, Evil

“The CBS crew had arrived: Ed Bradley; his producer, David Gelber; and a cameraman. The 60 Minutes people had government permission to work on other stories in Beijing, but they went first to Shanghai as tourists, which gave them cover to work on the real story. Ordinary Chinese did not recognize Ed Bradley as a television star as he walked down the streets of Shanghai.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[Troublemaker: One Man's Crusade Against China's Cruelty, 120, 0970402996, Harry Wu, ‎Hongda Harry Wu, ‎George Vecsey, 1996, Newsmax Media Inc]
About

People, Star

“Be very careful of what you allow to infiltrate your consciousness and subconsciousness. When you watch too much television, you'll start to feel inferior from all the commercials hard selling the idea that you're not complete unless you buy their product […] The ad agencies appeal to your fear of not being wanted or loved. It's the same with the local news. They get you to stay tuned with a constant stream of fear tactics […] It's as if our culture is addicted to fear and the flat screen is our drug dealer. Don't allow that crap into your head!”

RuPaul (1960) Actriz de Televisa, dueña y señora de los ejidos cacaoahuateros

Source: Veronica Well You Better Werk! 10 Life Lessons From RuPaul In (Mostly) Gif Form http://madamenoire.com/288751/you-better-werk-10-life-lessons-from-rupaul-in-mostly-gif-form/7/, MadameNoire, 30 July 2013

Love, Fear, Feeling, Idea

“In the age of pseudo‑events it is less the artificial simplification than the artificial complication of experience that confuses us. Whenever in the public mind a pseudo‑event competes for attention with a spontaneous event in the same field, the pseudo‑event will tend to dominate. What happens on television will overshadow what happens off television.”

Daniel J. Boorstin (1914–2004) American historian

Source: The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961), p. 39.

Age

“In the street the rain was little more than a fine mist which softened the outlines of the houses and even lent a touch of poetry to a neighbourhood unlikely to evoke tender emotions. He raised his eyes to a roofline bristling with television aerials, lowered them again to windows still blank before the evening lights were lit.”

Anita Brookner (1928–2016) British novelist and art historian.

Making Things Better (2002)

Light, Housing

“It's a good thing Winston Churchill was around before the shallow age of television. He might never have become one of the greatest leaders of all time and — for my money — one of the most charismatic. And, what the hell, also one of the sexiest.”

Neil Cavuto (1958) American television presenter

"Why can't ugly people have charisma?" http://www.townhall.com/opinion/columns/neilcavuto/2004/07/10/12307.html, townhall.com, (July 10, 2004).

Money, Age, Hell, Time

“Television has changed the American child from an irresistible force into an immovable object.”

Laurence J. Peter (1919–1990) Canadian eductor

Source: Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), p. 324

Change

“[after watching a spitting cobra spit at Steve Irwin]
Y'all, I am screaming at my television set: THEY'RE SPITTING COBRAS, YOU MORON!! Didn't you hear the”

Bill Engvall (1957) American comedian and actor

Hocking sound
Here's Your Sign Live! (2004)

“Imagine the books burning. And tapes and films and files, radios and televisions, will all go into that same bonfire. All those libraries and bookstores blazing away in the night. People will attack microwave relay stations. People with axes will chop every fiber-optic cable.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 7

People, Books, Imagination, Night

“There was also a real Dayton out there, a charming small Ohio city, famous as the birthplace of the Wright Brothers. Its citizens energized us from the outset. Unlike the population of, say, Noew York, Geneva or Washington, which would scarcely notice another conference, Daytonians were proud to be part of history. Large signs at the commercial airport hailed Dayton as the "temporary center of international peace". The local newspapers and television stations covered the story from every angle, drawing the people deeper into the proceedings. When we ventured into a restaurant or a shopping center downtown, people crowded around, aying that they were praying for us. Warren Christopher was given at least one standing ovation in a restaurant. Families on the air base placed "candles of peace" in their front windows, and people gathered in peace vigils outside the base. One day they formed a "peace chain", although it was not large enough to surround the sprawling eight-thousand-acre base. Ohio's famous ethnic diversity was only on display. We did everything possible to emphasize the fact that in the American heartland people from every part of southeastern Europe lived together in peace, their competition restricted to softball games, church rivalries, and the occasional barroom fight. (…)”

Richard Holbrooke (1941–2010) American diplomat

Source: 1990s, To End a War (1998), p. 234

People, Family, Peace, History

“I want to say this to the television audience. I made my mistakes, but in all of my years of public life, I have never profited, never profited from public service. I have earned every cent. And in all of my years of public life, I have never obstructed justice. And I think, too, that I can say that in my years of public life, that I welcome this kind of examination because people have got to know whether or not their President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook.”

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

I've earned everything I've got. Televised press conference with 400 Associated Press Managing Editors at Walt Disney World, Florida. (17 November 1973) Often transcribed as "I am not a crook." 'I Am Not A Crook': How A Phrase Got A Life Of Its Own http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=245830047, on National Public Radio 1970s

Life, People, Justice, Thinking

“This is the essential importance of the Alliance for Better Campaigns' efforts backed by Common Cause. It is our campaign to give free time to all legitimate candidates. … What our campaign asks is that the television industry yield just a tiny percentage of that windfall, less than 1 percent, to fund free airtime.”

Walter Cronkite (1916–2009) American broadcast journalist

Free the Airwaves! (2002)

Effort, Time

“This is the greatest political question of our time. How can we put an end to the empire of mega-corporations and restore democracy? If I knew I would be the savior of the world. What I think I can tell is that the media are crucial. The power of the corporate media enables truth to be suppressed and lies to be passed as truth. You probably heard that a half-truth can be worse than a lie. A lot of the things that our governments and media saying are 1/10 truths, 9/10 lies. And it doesn't take very many of them together to create a completely fictional world view (like the one that Bush presents when he talks). So I recommend that people stop listening to the mainstream media. Don't watch television news. Don't listen the news on radio. Don't read news from ordinary newspapers. Get it from variety of web sites which are not operated under the power of business money and you'll have better chance of not being fooled by the systematic lies that they all tell, because they're all paid by the same people to tell the same lies or 9/10 lies.”

Richard Stallman (1953) American software freedom activist, short story writer and computer programmer, founder of the GNU project

2000s, What is free software? (2006)

Money, People, Truth, Lie

“The revolution will be televised.”

Snoop Dogg (1971) American rapper, singer-songwriter, record producer, and actor

"Welcome to the world of the Plastic Beach", Plastic Beach by Gorillaz (2010).

“Jon Stewart: And I made a special effort to come on the show today, because I have privately, amongst my friends and also in occasional newspapers and television shows, mentioned this show as being bad.
Paul Begala: We have noticed.
Stewart: And I wanted to — I felt that that wasn't fair and I should come here and tell you that I don't — it's not so much that it's bad, as it's hurting America.
Tucker Carlson: But in its defense —
Stewart: But I wanted to come here today and say — Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys:
Carlson: Yes.
Stewart: Stop. Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.”

Jon Stewart (1962) American political satirist, writer, television host, actor, media critic and stand-up comedian

Guy, Effort, Hurt

“Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion.”

Randall Jarrell (1914–1965) poet, critic, novelist, essayist

“Fifty Years of American Poetry”, pp. 332–333
The Third Book of Criticism (1969)

World, Waiting, Heart

“You watch television much?” Padillo asked.
“Some,” I said. “It’s like China. If you ignore it, it just gets worse.”

Ross Thomas (1926–1995) 1926-1995 American writer

Cast a Yellow Shadow (1967)

“The difference between writing a book and being on television is the difference between conceiving a child and having a baby made in a test tube.”

Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American novelist, journalist, essayist, playwright, film maker, actor and political candidate

"The Siege of Mailer : Hero to Historian" in The Village Voice (21 January 1971); republished in Conversations with Norman Mailer (1988), edited by J. Michael Lennon

Books, Baby

“In the mass movement into the suburban areas a new kind of community was produced, which caricatured both the historic city and the archetypal suburban refuge: a multitude of uniform, unidentifiable houses, lined up inflexibly, at uniform distances, on uniform roads, in a treeless communal waste, inhabited by people of the same class, the same income, the same age group, witnessing the same television performances, eating the same tasteless prefabricated foods, from the same freezers, conforming in every outward and inward respect to a common mold, manufactured in the central metropolis. Thus the ultimate effect of the suburban escape in our time is, ironically, a low-grade uniform environment from which escape is impossible.”

Lewis Mumford book The City in History

pg 486
The City in History (1961)

People, Age, Food, Communication

“Turning away from the computer I saw through my own narrow window (at least it opened) the green, the blue, the flashes. I looked to the clock, the screen, the window. An hour passed, then two. I looked again at the clock and saw it had been only twenty minutes. I willed the second-hand, the minute-hand, the hour-hand to move faster, to deliver me to five o'clock when I would be released as from my prison term. Then suddenly I stopped, struck by the absurdity of wishing away the only thing I've got. Eight hours, eighty years, it was all too similar. Would I wish away the years until the day of my retirement, until my time was once again my own? At work I tried to keep busy to make the hours pass quickly. It was no different when watching television, socializing, moving frenetically--there are so many ways to kill time.”

Derrick Jensen book A Language Older Than Words

A Language Older Than Words (2000)

Way, Business, Time

“The writers of "Sanford and Son" were so brave in bringing their program to television. I mean, working with all those black people!”

Sarah Silverman (1970) American comedian and actress

Jesus Is Magic (2005)

People

“Prior to the Industrial Revolution, the daily life of most humans ran its course within three ancient frames: the nuclear family, the extended family and the local intimate community.* Most people worked in the family business – the family farm or the family workshop, for example – or they worked in their neighbours’ family businesses. The family was also the welfare system, the health system, the education system, the construction industry, the trade union, the pension fund, the insurance company, the radio, the television, the newspapers, the bank and even the police.”

Yuval Noah Harari book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind

Life, People, Health, Education

“My four years of high school were spent locked up inside “el campo.” I became a voracious reader and television-watcher, keeping to myself at such alarming extremes that I became invisible. My invisibility provided the perfect protection against harm of any sort. I walked to and from school past the gangsters as silently as a breeze, so disassociated from their tattoos and lingo that even they couldn't find a place for me in their lines of vision.”

Rigoberto González (1970) American writer

Butterfly Boy: Memories of a Chicano Mariposa (2006)

School, Past, Tattoo, Perfection

“Violence shouldn't be presented as drama. I think people looking for an easy way out often write scenes where characters come into violent conflict as opposed to looking for the true drama in the situation. That's a shortcoming of a lot of films and television shows. I think certain presentations of violence are not immoral, but amoral.”

David Fincher (1962) American film director

Fightin Words (1999)

People, Way, Thinking

“He was exceptionally aggressive. He said I would do anything to get on television. That's rubbish. The fact is that out of the 10 tasks we were given to do in the series I was on the winning side eight times.”

James Max (1970) British journalist

Of Apprentice judge Paul Kemsley. Daily Telegraph 28 Apr 2005 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/2914680/Had-bad-day-at-the-office---I-got-fired-and-2.5m-were-watching.html

Time

“Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can come of it.”

C. P. Scott (1846–1932) British journalist, publisher and politician

The story of BBC Television - How it all began http://www.bbc.co.uk/historyofthebbc/research/general/tvstory1

“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it! — that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms — nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”

Joyce Carol Oates book You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This (1987), pt. 1, ch. 13

Color, Loss

“In keeping with the WXLT practice of presenting the most immediate and complete reports of local blood and guts news, TV 40 presents what is believed to be a television first. In living color, an exclusive coverage of an attempted suicide.”

Christine Chubbuck (1944–1974) American television news reporter

On July 15, 1974 at 9:38 AM, 8 minutes into her talk show, Suncoast Digest, on WXLT-TV. Moments later, Chubbuck produced a pistol from beneath her newsdesk and fatally shot herself in the head.

Color, Suicide

“Expensive firefighting equipment is rushed to the scene immediately on the sound of an alarm no matter what is on fire. Elaborate freeways in our metropolitan areas, costing many millions of dollars, are available to any motor vehicle. Microwave systems bring to ones television a program or view of an event taking place thousands of miles away. For the same few cents one can send a letter a short distance or across the continent.”

Stanley Knowles (1908–1997) Canadian politician

Source: The New Party - (1961), Chapter 5, O Canada, p. 55

“Three cents’ worth of squeeze bottles, plus two cents’ worth of homogenized goo, plus prime-time television equals 28 million annual sales at 69 cents each. This is the heartbeat of industrial America.”

John D. MacDonald (1916–1986) writer from the United States

Travis McGee series, (1964)

Time

“If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? … Is He manoeuvring to maximise David Attenborough's television ratings?”

Richard Dawkins (1941) English ethologist, evolutionary biologist and author

River out of Eden (1995)

Sport

“Conversation like television set on honeymoon… unnecessary.”

Peter Sellers (1925–1980) British film actor, comedian and singer

As "Mr. Wang" in Murder by Death (1976)
Performances

“The appearance of stability from 1840 to about 1900 was superficial, temporary and destructive in the long run… because communities and societies must rest upon cooperation and not upon competition. Anyone who says that society can be run on the basis of everyone's trying to maximize his own greed is talking total nonsense. And to teach it in schools, and to go on television and call it the American way of life still doesn't make it true. Competition and envy cannot become the basis of any society or any community.”

Carroll Quigley (1910–1977) American historian

Oscar Iden Lecture Series, Lecture 3: "The State of Individuals" (1976)

Life, School, Way, Communication

“If books were sold as software and online recordings are, they would have this legalese up front:
The content of this book is distributed on an 'as is' basis, without warranty as to accuracy of content, quality of writing, punctuation, usefulness of the ideas presented, merchantability, correctness or readability of formulae, charts, and figures, or correspondence of (a) the table of contents with the actual contents, (2) page references in the index (if any) with the actual page numbering (if present), and (iii) any illustration with its adjacent caption. Illustrations may have been printed reversed or inverted, the publisher accepts no responsibility for orientation or chirality. Any resemblance of the author or his or her likeness or name to any person, living or dead, or their heirs or assigns, is coincidental; all references to people, places, or events have been or should have been fictionalized and may or may not have any factual basis, even if reported as factual. Similarities to existing works of art, literature, song, or television or movie scripts is pure happenstance. References have been chosen at random from our own catalog. Neither the author(s) nor the publisher shall have any liability whatever to any person, corporation, animal whether feral or domesticated, or other corporeal or incorporeal entity with respect to any loss, damage, misunderstanding, or death from choking with laughter or apoplexy at or due to, respectively, the contents; that is caused or is alleged to be caused by any party, whether directly or indirectly due to the information or lack of information that may or may not be found in this alleged work. No representation is made as to the correctness of the ISBN or date of publication as our typist isn't good with numbers and errors of spelling and usage are attributable solely to bugs in the spelling and grammar checker in Microsoft Word. If sold without a cover, this book will be thinner than those sold with a cover. You do not own this book, but have acquired only a revocable non-exclusive license to read the material contained herein. You may not read it aloud to any third party. This disclaimer is a copyrighted work of Jef Raskin, first published in 2004, and is distributed 'as is', without warranty as to quality of humor, incisiveness of commentary, sharpness of taunt, or aptness of jibe.”

Jef Raskin (1943–2005) American computer scientist

"If Books Were Sold as Software" http://www.newsscan.com/cgi-bin/findit_view?table=newsletter&dateissued=20040818#11200, NewsScan.com (18 August 2004) If Books Were Sold as Software (2004)

Death, People, Books, Art

“Leather shoes and fried chicken and dead soldiers are only a tragedy if you waste their gift sitting in front of the television. Or stuck in traffic. Or stranded at some airport.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Haunted

Haunted (2005)

Shoe, Dead

“President Reagan must be happy over how bad the weather's been this winter, because its the one thing no one's blaming on him. Theres nothing television news likes better than bad weather, and we sure get a lot of it in the United States.”

Andy Rooney (1919–2011) writer, humorist, television personality

[Andy Rooney, w:Andy Rooney, 8, Weather, Years of Minutes, 2003, PublicAffairs, 978-1586482114]

Winter, Weather, Happiness

“Culture made the use of the F-bomb on television unthinkable in 1965; 40 years later, HBO would be lost without it.”

Allen C. Guelzo (1953) American historian

2010s, Free Speech and Its Present Crisis (2018)

“The details of which candidate said what during a single televised debate in October 1960 could have given the electoral victory to Nixon instead of to Kennedy, but no details of who said what could have blocked the European conquest of Native Americans.”

Jared Diamond book Guns, Germs, and Steel

Source: Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1997), p. 424

Victory

“The revolution will not be televised
The revolution is here”

Common (rapper) (1972) American rapper, actor and author from Illinois

"The 6th Sense" (Track 9)
Albums, Like Water for Chocolate (2000)

“Television is a great leveler. You always end up sounding like the people who ask the questions.”

Gore Vidal (1925–2012) American writer

"Sex Is Politics" (1979)
1980s, The Second American Revolution (1983)

People, Question

“It's just a television show, we have fun with it and try to make each other crack up.”

David Boreanaz (1969) American actor, famous for Angel and Buffy

BBC interview

“By conducting a media fast - turning off the television, radio, and computer - we stop the influx of poison that keeps us buying and desiring more.”

Skye Jethani

The Divine Commodity: Discovering A Faith Beyond Consumer Christianity (2009, Zondervan)

“Today the percentage of female judges, college professors and detectives seen on television is a pretty good reflection of the actual world. (In the case of judges, I wouldn't be shocked to find out the number on television exceeds the number in real life — what is it about those black robes that makes us think ovaries?)
But merely thrusting more women into more prestigious on-screen jobs doesn't necessarily make the working world a better place for women. If you were to show people images of two real-life professionals, one a man, one a woman, and ask them to rate their competence knowing nothing but job and gender — I bet people still give the guys the edge.
It's not television's fault, exactly. But television can help fix the problem. Not by writing women into better professions, but by more accurately showing them as complex people contending with the sort of snide, generous, ambitious, incompetent, sad and hilarious co-workers who populate real workplaces.”

Jane Espenson (1964) American television writer and producer

How to Succeed at Vampire Slaying and Keep Your Soul (2005)

Life, Women, People, World

“The upbringing of the people, and particularly means of mass influence - the press, radio, television, and film - should be in the hands of people whose good Islamic moral and intellectual authority is indisputable.”

Alija Izetbegović (1925–2003) Chairman of the Presidency of Bosnia and Herzegovina

Source: The Islamic Declaration (1970), p. 42.

People

“You don't become a journalist because you're good at keeping secrets. Being a Journalist is about telling. It's about bearing the bad news. Spreading the contagion. The biggest story in history. This could be the end of mass media. The Culling song would be a plague unique to the Information Age. Imagine a world where people shun the television, the radio, movies, the Internet, magazines, and newspapers. People have to wear earplugs the way they wear condoms and rubber gloves. In the past, nobody worried too much about sex with strangers. Or before that, bites from fleas. Or untreated drinking water. Mosquitoes. Asbestos.”

Chuck Palahniuk book Lullaby

Source: Lullaby (2002), Chapter 7

People, Secret, Age, World

“Television is a medium, so called because it is neither rare nor well-done.”

Ernie Kovacs (1919–1962) American comedian, actor, and writer

Quoted in Wired 4.07, p. 102 [July 1996]

“That has never been heard of in the history of television. It takes a week to do a sitcom in Hollywood. I do a show a day in my studio, three or four shows a week. So what takes most shows eight years to do, we do in a year”

Tyler Perry (1966) American actor, director, screenwriter, playwright, producer, author, and songwriter

Interview: Tyler Perry, movie mogul, 21 August 2010

History

“That's certainly made me think. It's made me think I don't want a television any more.”

Charlie Brooker (1971) journalist, broadcaster and writer from England

Discussing the end sequence of "The Execution of Gary Glitter" on Screenwipe Review of the Year 2009
Screenwipe

Thinking

“Television tells us everyday that we live in a world we don't understand. And yet in the main it does little to explain that world. It tells us of new products that make the products we have either old-fashioned or obsolete. Above all, if today we are aware of how fast the world around us is changing, it's because television acts as a relentless reminder of that fact.”

James Burke (science historian) (1936) British broadcaster, science historian, author, and television producer

Connections (1979), 9 - Countdown

World, Fashion, Understanding, Change

“There is no intimacy; it’s not live. [he said of online games] It’s being translated through a computer, and your imagination is not there the same way it is when you’re actually together with a group of people. It reminds me of one time where I saw some children talking about whether they liked radio or television, and I asked one little boy why he preferred radio, and he said, "Because the pictures are so much better."”

Gary Gygax (1938–2008) American writer and game designer

Interview in 2006, as quoted in "Gary Gygax, Game Pioneer, Dies at 69" in The New York Times (5 March 2008)

Children, People, Way, Imagination

“Ed Bradley has remained a part of the CBS news team where he has garnered numerous awards on the popular 60 Minutes news magazine television show.”

Ed Bradley (1941–2006) News correspondent

[I'll Find a Way or Make One, 4, 0061976938, Dwayne Ashley, ‎Juan Williams, ‎Adrienne Ingrum, 2009, HarperCollins]
About

Parting

“Immediately I knew that was problematic [being paired on a television show with John Lewis]. Because the show starts with our bios, and it starts with, ‘John Lewis, hero of the civil rights movement stood on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. … He literally bled the southern soil red. And then it goes to me. ‘Cory Booker, riding his Big Wheel in affluent suburbia, falls off and skins his knee: He bled the New Jersey soil red.’ And so you are very aware if you were born after the civil rights movement, if you were born in my generation, that you stand on the shoulders of giants.”

Cory Booker (1969) 35th Class 2 senator for New Jersey in U.S. Congress

[Kopan, Tal, Black senators eye future generation, https://www.politico.com/story/2014/02/black-senators-meeting-tim-scott-103928, 21 August 2018, Politico, February 26, 2014]
2014

“Television encourages separation: people from community, people from each other, people from themselves, creating more buying units and discouraging organized opposition to the system. It creates a surrogate community: Itself. It becomes everyone’s intimate advisor, teacher and guide to appropriate behavior and awareness. Thereby, it becomes its own feedback system, furthering its own growth and accelerating the transformation of everything and everyone into artificial form. This enables a handful of people to obtain a unique degree of power.”

Jerry Mander (1936) American activist

Source: Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television (1978), p. 133

People, Behavior, Communication, Teachers

“Television, as the most "public" of media, has its limits.”

Daniel Bell book The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

Source: The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (1976), Chapter 2, The Disjunction of Cultural Discourse, p. 108

“Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.”

Clive James (1939–2019) Australian author, critic, broadcaster, poet, translator and memoirist

'Introduction'
Essays and reviews, Glued to the Box (1983)

People, World, Change

“Television people have put blinders on and they absolutely refuse—and movie people too—to admit that they can have any influence for ill in our society. You know the argument: 'We only reflect what's going on. We do not perpetuate it.' And yet not a week goes by in this town where there's not an award ceremony where they're patting each other on the back, saying, 'You raised AIDS awareness' [or] 'There'll be no more child abuse thanks to this fine show you did.' The argument is you can only do influence for good; you can't influence for ill. That makes no sense at all.”

Pat Sajak (1946) American television host

Attributed to Pat Sajak, in: Bloom: A Girl's Guide to Growing Up, (2003), p. 171
2000s

People, Sense

“I know very well the sorts of pressures you're under in television. I don't work in television anymore myself, but I'm constantly hearing from colleagues who present scripts to networks and are told, "The script is too complex. You have to keep it simple because the audience is dumb. You can make more money for the advertisers that way."”

Michael Haneke (1942) Austrian film director and screenwriter

as interviewed by Richard Porton, "Collective Guilt and Individual Responsibility: An Interview with Michael Haneke," Cineaste, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Winter 2005), pp. 50-51

Money, Way

“If trashy television was a video game, The Jenny Jones show would be the final boss.”

Maddox (1978) American internet writer

The Best Page in the Universe

Game

“In Europe, you do philosophy by performing discourse on another guy's text, and so Derrida will go over Heidegger, and Habermas will extend Marx's corpus; but in America you could never get away with kinky stuff like that, for you have to generate philosophy from real things—like computers or television. You need to look at Omni magazine to get a feel for this new kind of mail-order, Popular Mechanics science of mind. It's full of articles about meditation helmets and downloading the soul into computers so that when your body wears out you can live forever. What is completely missing in Europe is precisely what you will find in America: namely, an electronic Umwelt in which history is replaced with movies, education is replaced with entertainment, and nature is replaced with technology. This peculiar wedding of low kitsch and high tech generates a posthistoric world that no European literary intellectual can quite fathom.”

William Irwin Thompson (1938) American writer

Thompson (1991) Fast Foreword, from The American Replacement of Nature.

World, Education, Guy, Feeling

“But because science doesn't know everything, that doesn't mean science knows nothing. Science knows enough for us to be watched by a few million people now on television, for these lights to be working, for quite extraordinary miracles to have taken place in terms of the harnessing of the physical world and our dim approaches towards understanding it.”

Stephen Fry (1957) English comedian, actor, writer, presenter, and activist

Room 101 (2001) Season 6 Episode 10
2000s
Context: The key word for me (my spleen isn't really big enough to explode with all the splenetic juices of fury that drive me when I consider this), but the real key word that triggers my rage is the word 'energy', when people start talking about it in terms of negative or positive types. For instance, "there's very negative energy in here." What are you talking about? What do you mean? I mean, let's think about it. What does energy mean? Well, we know what it means: energy from petrol when it's burned, it moves the car. "This room has positive energy" — well, where the fuck's it going then? It's not moving. It's covering up such woolly thinking, such pathetic nonsense. And astrology: most people will say of astrology, "Well, it's harmless fun." And I should say that for 80% of the cases it probably is harmless fun, but there's a strong way in which it isn't harmless. One, because it is so anti-science. You will hear things like, "Science doesn't know everything." Well, of course science doesn't know everything. But because science doesn't know everything, that doesn't mean science knows nothing. Science knows enough for us to be watched by a few million people now on television, for these lights to be working, for quite extraordinary miracles to have taken place in terms of the harnessing of the physical world and our dim approaches towards understanding it. And as Wittgenstein quite rightly said, "When we understand every single secret of the universe, there will still be left the eternal mystery of the human heart."

People, World, Understanding, Light

“I would never see a good movie for the first time on television.”

Jean-Luc Godard (1930) French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic

Cited in: Tim Concannon, Praising Arizona http://www.blackmassmovies.com/docs/Praising%20Arizona.pdf, March 2013 Source: Los Angeles Free Press, March 15, 1968. Gene Youngblood

Time

“Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park.”

Paddy Chayefsky (1923–1981) American playwright, screenwriter and novelist

Network (1976)
Context: Television is not the truth. Television is a goddamned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a traveling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion tamers, a football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.

Truth

“I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.”

Ann Coulter (1961) author, political commentator

2005
Context: I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo.
But if we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9-11, any president who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for being an inept commander in chief.
With a huge gaping hole in lower Manhattan, I'm not sure why we have to keep reminding people, but we are at war. (Perhaps it's because of the media blackout on images of the 9-11 attack. We're not allowed to see those because seeing planes plowing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon might make us feel angry and jingoistic.)
Among the things that war entails are: killing people (sometimes innocent), destroying buildings (sometimes innocent) and spying on people (sometimes innocent).
That is why war is a bad thing. But once a war starts, it is going to be finished one way or another, and I have a preference for it coming out one way rather than the other.

Thinking, Sport

“When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it's "The Simpsons," Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groening, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, Is this going to be a problem? It's only a couple seconds. Matt says, No, no, no, it's not going to be a problem, call so and so.”

Lawrence Lessig (1961) American academic, political activist.

OSCON 2002
Context: Here's a story: There was a documentary filmmaker who was making a documentary film about education in America. And he's shooting across this classroom with lots of people, kids, who are completely distracted at the television in the back of the classroom. When they get back to the editing room, they realize that on the television, you can barely make out the show for two seconds; it's "The Simpsons," Homer Simpson on the screen. So they call up Matt Groening, who was a friend of the documentary filmmaker, and say, you know, Is this going to be a problem? It's only a couple seconds. Matt says, No, no, no, it's not going to be a problem, call so and so. So they called so and so, and so and so said call so and so.
Eventually, the so and so turns out to be the lawyers, so when they got to the lawyers, they said, Is this going to be a problem? It's a documentary film. It's about education. It's a couple seconds. The so and so said 25,000 bucks. 25,000 bucks?! It's a couple seconds! What do you mean 25,000 bucks? The so and so said, I don't give a goddamn what it is for. $25,000 bucks or change your movie. Now you look at this and you say this is insane. It's insane. And if it is only Hollywood that has to deal with this, OK, that's fine. Let them be insane. The problem is their insane rules are now being applied to the whole world. This insanity of control is expanding as everything you do touches copyrights.

Problem

“Everyone gossips on television; it's all so trivial and it's impossible to hear anything.”

Terry Gilliam (1940) American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe

Terry Gilliam's flying circus (2006)
Context: I am quite bored nowadays. I don't know if it's age and the fact that I have seen so many things and am less surprised, or whether the problem is truly the content. But things have been repeating themselves for 30-40 years already. It seems to me that there is no desire to push the envelope or even to peek there. People are afraid. In the 1960s and 1970s we pushed the limits farther. More attention was paid to what was going on around.
Television and the media are everywhere and they are taking over so powerfully. They don't shut up for a second. So you are unable to think. It is very difficult to think independently when you are surrounded by all that noise. What I most aspire to is to be alone. Not lonely, but alone. To stop all this noise. That is what I do when I go to Umbria. There is no television there, no telephone.
The situation is especially serious with television. The money is dispersed among hundreds of stations so that no money is left for good things. In our time there was far greater depth. Not everything is artificial and as cheap as possible. Everyone gossips on television; it's all so trivial and it's impossible to hear anything.

“Television and the media are everywhere and they are taking over so powerfully. They don't shut up for a second. So you are unable to think.”

Terry Gilliam (1940) American-born British screenwriter, film director, animator, actor and member of the Monty Python comedy troupe

Thinking

“Television's quasi-hypnotic effect is one reason that the political economy supported by the television industry is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.”

Al Gore (1948) 45th Vice President of the United States

Quotes, The Assault on Reason (2007)
Context: Television's quasi-hypnotic effect is one reason that the political economy supported by the television industry is as different from the vibrant politics of America's first century as those politics were different from the feudalism that thrived on the ignorance of the masses of people in the Dark Ages.
Our systematic exposure to fear and other arousal stimuli on television can be exploited by the clever public relations specialist, advertiser, or politician.

People, Age, Support

Quotes about television page 6

Quotes about television
page 6