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Arranged by author

• The role of television is the illusion of company, noise. I call it the fifth wall and the second window: the window of illusion.
  • Mumia Abu-Jamal I spend my days preparing for life, not for death The Guardian, Laura Smith 25 October 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,2198557,00.html

• The luminous screen in the home carries fantastic authority. Viewers everywhere tend to accept it as a window on the world... It has tended to displace or overwhelm other influences such as newspapers, school, church, grandpa, grandma. It has become the definer and transmitter of society's values.
  • Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes On a Modern Potentate (Oxford University Press, 1978), ISBN 0-19-502614-4, p. 75

• Bread and circuses—to some observers, welfare and television seemed modern equivalents, pacifiers of empire, protectors of power and privilege.
  If television has assumed this role, it is not the result of a struggle between good guys and bad guys. If it were, it would be easy to solve, like problems in televisionland... The sponsor who thinks in terms of maximizing sales and profits is doing his duty... The advertising agency executive who recommends programs and time-slots in terms of audience size and demographic targets is likewise doing his job... The network sales executive who favors programs that advertising agencies will recommend to sponsors is performing his task... The problem—the folly—is not in any of these, but in a system that has made the center of national attention a market item, for sale at auction prices. The system has put the leadership of our society on the auction block.
  • Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes On a Modern Potentate (Oxford University Press, 1978), ISBN 0-19-502614-4, p. 171-172

• For intellectual authority, the appropriate version of Descartes's cogito would be today: I am talked about, therefore I am.
  • Zygmunt Bauman, The Individualised Society, 2001

• I’d park myself a few inches from the RCA color television set we had. I was so close, I could feel the static electricity of the screen tugging at the peach fuzz on my face and smell the wonderful aroma of electrically heated dust coming from the vents of that lustrous wooden console. No matter how many times my mother yelled, “Kevin! Move back before you go blind!” I’d still feel myself powerfully drawn into that world, and the worn-out seats of my Lee jeans bore witness to the pull I was powerless to resist.
  • Kevin Clash, puppeteer who plays Elmo on Sesame Street, on his childhood. Published in 2006 as part of My Life as a Furry Red Monster.

• It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
  • T.S. Eliot, Ney York Post (Sept 22, 1963)

• Television is just another appliance- It's just a toaster with pictures.
  • Mark Fowler, FCC Chairman, from an interview with Reason Magazine, May 1982 http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1568/is_1998_Dec/ai_53260535/pg_4

• Television, the drug of the Nation, Breeding ignorance and feeding radiation.
  Where imagination is sucked out of children by a cathode ray nipple. T.V. is the only wet nurse that would create a cripple
  • Michael Franti,Television drug of the nation, from Hypocrisy is the Greatest Luxury, by Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, 1991 http://www.samulilintula.net/netti/tv.html

• Television has done much for psychiatry by spreading information about it, as well as contributing to the need for it.
  • Alfred Hitchcock, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. 1960

• like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.
  • Alfred Hitchcock, NY Journal-American 25 Aug. 1965

• One of television’s great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs.
  • Alfred Hitchcock, National Observer 15 Aug. 1966

• 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, National Observer 15 Aug. 1966

• News is not at all an easy thing to do on television. A good many of the main news items are not easily made visual — therefore we have the problem of giving news with the same standards that the corporation has built up in sound.
  • Sir Ian Jacob, BBC director General , c. July 1954
  • "BBC launches daily TV news", BBC.co.uk; on the launch of the televised BBC News on 5 July 1954

• Television is simultaneously blamed, often by the same people, for worsening the world and for being powerless to change it.
  • Clive James, introduction to Glued to the Box

• On the big screen they showed us a sun/ But not as bright in life as the real one/ It's never quite the same as the real one.
  • Elton John "Grey Seal" from the album Goodbye Yellow Brick Road

• We have found that television is such a huge part of baby boomers' DNA that it makes sense that so much of America's pop culture jargon comes from TV.
  • Larry W. Jones, TV Land president
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    • I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you--and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.
      • Newton Minow, FCC Chairman, May 9, 1961 http://janda.org/b20/news%20articles/vastwastland.htm
    
    
    • 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, San Francisco Bay Guardian, October 30, 2002
    
    
    • I think that parents only get so offended by television because they rely on it as a babysitter and the sole educator of their kids.
      • Trey Parker and Matt Stone, South Park
    
    
    • Television has changed the American child from an irresistible force into an immovable object.
      • Laurence J. Peter , Peter's Quotations: Ideas for Our Time (1977), ISBN 0-688-03217-6, p. 324
    
    
    • The revolution will not be televised. The Revolution will be no rerun, brothers. The Revolution — will be live.
      • Gil Scott-Heron, The revolution will not be televised, 1971 http://www.gilscottheron.com/lyrevol.html
    
    
    • 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, Cold Turkey, In These Times, May 10, 2004
    
    
    • Thanks to TV and for the convenience of TV, you can only be one of two kinds of human beings, either a liberal or a conservative.
      • Kurt Vonnegut, Cold Turkey, In These Times, May 10, 2004
    
    
    • I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
      • Orson Welles, New York Herald Tribune, (Oct.12, 1956)
    
    

    Unsourced

    • It used to be that we in films were the lowest form of art. Now we have something to look down on. ~ Billy Wilder
    
    
    • Sex on television can’t hurt you – unless you fall off. ~ Woody Allen
    
    
    • Television is called a medium because it is neither rare or well done ~ variously attributed
    
    
    • Television is for appearing on, not looking at. ~ Noel Coward
    
    
    • TV is like taking black spray paint to your third eye. ~ Bill Hicks
    
    
    • "Television - teacher, mother, secret lover" ~ Homer Simpson
    
    
    • Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we should have people standing in the corners of our rooms. ~ Alan Coren
    
    
    • The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience ~ Bill Bryson
    
    
    • Television has raised writing to a new low. ~ Samuel Goldwyn (1882 - 1974)
    
    
    • There are many ways to talk about television. But in a "Business" perspective, let's be realistic : basically, TF1's job is to help Coca-Cola sell its product, for instance. To make the advertising message well received, the audience's brain must be available. Our shows are here to make the brain available, to entertain it, to relax it, to prepare it between two messages. What we're selling to Coca-Cola is available human brain time. Nothing is as difficult as getting this availability. ~ Patrick Le Lay, CEO of TF1, the main French TV-channel
    
    
    • Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education. ~ Paul Erdös
    
    
    • TV is chewing gum for the eyes. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright
    
    
    • If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives. ~ Marlon Brando
    
    
    • Don't you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There's one marked 'Brightness,' but it doesn't work. ~ Gallagher
    
    
    • I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens. ~ Dwight D. Eisenhower
    
    
    • Television enables you to be entertained in your home by people you wouldn't have in your home. ~ David Frost
    
    
    • It is difficult to produce a television documentary that is both incisive and probing when every twelve minutes one is interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits singing about toilet paper. ~ Rod Serling (1924 - 1975)
    
    
    • Television? The word is half Greek and half Latin. No good will come of this device. ~ C. P. Scott 1936
    
    
    • My father hated radio and couldn't wait for television to be invented so he could hate that, too. ~ Peter De Vries, American novelist (1910-1993)
    
    
    • When the TV programme’s ratings fall, advertise Viagra. ~ Leonid S. Sukhorukov
    
    
    • Television is America's jester. It has assumed the guise of an idiot while actually accruing power and authority behind the smoke screen of its self-degradation. ~Lawrence Mintz
    
    
    The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television. ~Andrew Ross
    
    • Thank GOD my tv was there to catch my heads fa-AAAAHHHHHHH-ll. ~Jeremy "Sideshow" Von Myers, Author