Television Quotes

We owe a lot to Thomas Edison - if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight.

Milton Berle

If you can't run, you crawl. If you can't crawl-- you find someone to carry you.

Joss Whedon

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood,A beautiful day for a neighbor.Would you be mine?Could you be mine?...It's a neighborly day in this beauty wood,A neighborly day for a beauty.Would you be mine?Could you be mine?...I've always wanted to have a neighbor just like you.I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you.So, let's make the most of this beautiful day.Since we're together we might as well say:Would you be mine?Could you be mine?Won't you be my neighbor?Won't you please,Won't you please?Please won't you be my neighbor?

Fred Rogers

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

Joss Whedon

I'm not one of those people that goes into details of my personal life on national TV to get attention. Some things are better left unsaid.

Mariah Carey

The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing.

Carl Bernstein

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

Radiohead

Stop listening to the TV tell you about America the beautiful . . . get up and be America the beautiful.

Rivera Sun

The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.

Christopher Hitchens

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

Edward R. Murrow

The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.

E.B. (Elwyn Brooks) White

In the theater, while you recognized that you were looking at a house, it was a house in quotation marks. On screen, the quotation marks tend to be blotted out by the camera.

Arthur Miller

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

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

Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.

Justin Kaplan

Watching old movies is like spending an evening with those people next door. They bore us, and we wouldn't go out of our way to see them; we drop in on them because they're so close. If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago. Like Lot's wife, we are tempted to take another look, attracted not by evil but by something that seems much more shameful -- our own innocence.

Pauline Kael

TV is a fickle business. I'm only good for the length of my contract.

Tom Brokaw

Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.

Clive James

So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.

Conor Cruise O'Brien