Selected television quotes

1. Nobody and nothing beats The Simpsons. Even after all this time, it's still the best satire since Monty Python.

2. When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

3. The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.

4. 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.

5. Anybody who watches three games of football in a row should be declared brain dead.

6. Imitation is the sincerest form of television.

7. Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.

8. The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

9. You're on CNN. The show that leads into me is puppets making crank phone calls. What is wrong with you?

10. 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.

11. Privacy was in sufficient danger before TV appeared, and TV has given it its death blow.

12. Thanks to television, for the first time the young are seeing history made before it is censored by their elders.

13. If there's anything unsettling to the stomach, it's watching actors on television talk about their personal lives.

14. The television, that insidious beast, that Medusa which freezes a billion people to stone every night, staring fixedly, that Siren which called and sang and promised so much and gave, after all, so little.

15. Can we find nothing good to say about TV? Well, yes, it brings scattered solitaries into a sort of communion. TV allows your isolated American to think that he participates in the life of the entire country. It does not actually place him in a community, but his heart is warmed with the suggestion (on the whole false) that there is a community somewhere in the vicinity and that his atomized consciousness will be drawn back toward the whole.

16. Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.

17. This is The Tonight Show. I can't tell you too much about it, other than the fact that this program is going to go on forever.

18. It gets kinda monotonous, but that's television. There are plus sides and down sides. The positive side is that you have steady work for nine months of the year for however many years your show is on TV.

19. 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.

20. Another possible source of guidance for teenagers is television, but television's message has always been that the need for truth, wisdom and world peace pales by comparison with the need for a toothpaste that offers whiter teeth and fresher breath.

21. Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television.

22. 'Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.'

23. Never pass up a chance to have sex or appear on television.

24. I'm working on 'Buffy: Deep Space Nine. It will be dark and badly received.

25. For tens of millions of people television has become habit-forming, brain-softening, taste-degrading.

26. It was hard for me to do the show (All American Girl) because a lot of people didn't even understand the concept of Asian-American. I was on a morning show, and the host said, 'Awright, Margaret, we're changing over to an ABC affiliate! So why don't you tell our viewers in your native language that we're making that transition?' So I looked at the camera and said, 'Um, they're changing over to an ABC affiliate.'

27. 'I am in so many movies that are on TV at 2:00 a.m. that people think I am dead.'

28. 'Television, the drug of the nation, breeding ignorance and feeding radiation...'

29. Radio is the theater of the mind; television is the theater of the mindless.

30. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth -- I just hate what is being done with it.

31. I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television - of that I am quite sure.

32. Do not be deluded into believing that the titular heads of the networks control what appears on their networks. They all have better taste. All are responsible to stockholders, and in my experience all are honorable men. But they must schedule what they can sell in the public market.

33. We are currently wealthy, fat, comfortable and complacent. We have currently a built-in allergy to unpleasant or disturbing information. Our mass media reflect this. But unless we get up off our fat surpluses and recognize that television in the main is being used to distract, delude, amuse and insulate us, then television and those who finance it, those who look at it and those who work at it, may see a totally different picture too late.

34. If the use of leisure time is confined to looking at TV for a few extra hours every day, we will deteriorate as a people. (5 November 1958)

35. It would be ridiculous for me to say anything negative regarding blacks having an equal opportunity on TV. After all, I was number one in the ratings four times last year and twice this season. What could be more damn equal than that? If they get any more equal, I don't want it.

36. Educational television should be absolutely forbidden. It can only lead to unreasonable expectations and eventual disappointment when your child discovers that the letters of the alphabet do not leap up out of books and dance around the room with royal-blue chickens.

37. I hate television. I hate it as much as I hate peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.

38. I think television's become a downright dangerous thing. It has no moral barometer whatsoever. If you want to talk about something that is all about money, just watch the television. It's damn dangerous. TV does not care about you or what happens to you. It's downright bad for your health now, and that's not a far-out concept. I think watching the TV news is bad for you. It is bad for your physical health and your mental health. The music business looks like, you know, innocent schoolboys compared to the TV business. They care about nothing but profit.

39. Have you been watching American Idol? They have Simon Cowell and Paula Abdul judging the singing. Paula Abdul?! Getting Paula Abdul to judge a singing contest is like getting Christopher Reeve to judge a dance contest!

40. If you read a lot of books, you're considered well-read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well-viewed.

41. I think every good Christian ought to kick Falwell right in the ass.

42. It's a half-hour weekly show that I will host, entitled Let's Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus. It's a fairly self-explanatory concept: Each week we let the hounds of hell loose and chase that no-talent cracker asshole across the globe until I catch him by that fruity ponytail, pull him to his knees, and put a shotgun in his mouth like a big black cock of death [boom] and we'll be back in '95 with Let's Hunt and Kill Michael Bolton.

43. Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.

44. I can't watch TV longer than 5 minutes without praying for nuclear holocaust.

45. 'You goin' to hell, boy!' Yeah well, at least that's where all the good music's gonna be. Hey, just 'cause I'm up on the stage with the lights on me doesn't mean you all have to stare [audience laughs, then one person applauds]. Thank you, my seal. Later on : me and Barney the seal will be doing a little balancing act. He'll be balancing me over a bed of razorblades! Yeeaaah! It's not quite American Gladiators, but we're here to try! Man, American Gladiators. I tell you, the world's gonna end with someone watching that on the TV, man. That's mankind's ultimate fucking evolutionary achievement, isn't it? These pituary retards rassling each other : in Vegas!

46. Jack: I can't understand it. On your show you always win.

47. I had a brief theater background and loved the backstage world there's more backstage work in television, so I saw a job advertised and applied, and got it. That was back in 1977, when getting jobs was easy.

48. I worked for the BBC's rival, ITV, the commercial network. What was great about it was that due to regulatory wrinkles, there was a lot of money that had to be spent on programming.

49. When television is good, nothing--not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers--nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. 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.

50. We need imagination in programming, not sterility; creativity, not imitation; experimentation, not conformity; excellence, not mediocrity. Television is filled with creative, imaginative people. You must strive to set them free.

51. Unlike television - at least as it currently exists - the Internet is a medium of choice.

52. Good evening. We begin tonight...

53. An EEG of a person watching TV shows that after about half an hour the brain decides that nothing is happening, and it goes into a hypnoidal twilight state, emitting alpha waves. This is because there is such little eye motion.

54. Yet the final indictment against the television decision-makers is more profound and more serious. Their recent splurge of paranormalism debauches true science and undermines the efforts of their own excellent science departments. The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudo-scientific charlatans. The public appetite for wonder can be fed, through the powerful medium of television, without compromising the principles of honesty and reason.

55. 'How can you put out a meaningful drama when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing rabbits with toilet paper? No dramatic art form should be dictated and controlled by men whose training and insticts are cut of an entirely different cloth. The fact remains that these gentlemen sell consumer goods, not an art form.'

56. 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.

57. President Reagan brought us to the ultimate: America As Total Television. During his governance the printed word simply ceased to matter. White House dynamos had once telephoned newspapers to complain about unfair reporting. Not anymore. Now they telephoned network bosses. Even then it wasn't poor reporting they complained about, but poor pictures. A network reporter who thought her report on shortcomings in Reaganland would anger the President's cadres was amazed when the man in charge of propaganda thanked her for doing them a good turn. But, she said, that was a tough piece of reporting. Oh, the words may have been, said the gentleman, but on television words didn't matter. What mattered were pictures. And the pictures had been wonderful.

58. Many people hardly ever see a politician as a person anymore. Instead, a politician is a shadow they watch on television, not knowing whether he is speaking impromptu or reading a text written for him by anonymous advisers or experts from a screen hidden behind the cameras. Citizens no longer perceive their politician as a living human being, for they never have and will never see him that way. They see only his image, created for them by TV, radio and newspaper commentators.

59. (when walking to his dressing room) 'Fibber McGee... and Molly. Burns... And Allen. Lady and... Here's mine.'

60. He really did make us raise our sights. ~ Diane Sawyer, Good Morning America co-anchor

61. During the Famous 'Beer Truck' Episode of Raw before w:Wrestlemania XV, March 1999

62. Green Wing (series 1) playing Dr. Caroline Todd

63. Green Wing (series 2) playing Dr. Caroline Todd

64. Black Books playing Fran Katzenjammer

65. The Stand (miniseries)

66. Saturday Night Live

67. It's when you watch TV

68. The Daily Show

69. Wigfield