Quotes About Television

The good television of today is probably better than the best television of the old days. The bad television of today is worse. It is not only bad - it is damaging, meretricious, seedy and cynical.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

To harness the power of television for the education of our nation's children, everyone must get involved - television programmers, government leaders, teachers, and above all, parents.

First there was a young guy sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother, then there was an older fatter person sitting in front of television in a T-shirt drinking beer with his mother.

The thrill of doing television versus features is in television you get to focus more on the characters.

There is no doubt that directing television has helped hone my directing skills. What television teaches you is to be efficient and to think on your feet. You have to adhere to strict deadlines and budget constraints.

I think television scripts have become really intriguing and well-done. And writers have stopped drawing any actual line between film and television they used to never cross.

In Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury raised cautions against mass media, especially the television, which dumb down human sensibilities and coerce everybody's thoughts into a single uniform value, allowing human to forget the fundamental action of "having one's opinion". As a result, the society deteriorates. I decided to exhibit [Edward] Kienholz's work which features television as its subject, as well as the Big Double Cross as works that represent this warning.

I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television's most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options.

Television's getting better because people are investing more money and time and respect into it. But the secret weapon of television is that, because it's a slow burn, you get to meditate on things and develop them. As opposed to film, where you have an allotted amount of time and hopefully you can wrap it up in there.

I am guided by the vision of what I believe this show can be. Originally our goal was to uplift, enlighten, encourage and entertain through the medium of television. Now, our mission statement for The Oprah Winfrey Show is to use television to transform people's lives, to make viewers see themselves differently and to bring happiness and a sense of fulfillment into every home.

Are we on the tail-end of a generation that is enamored with the novelty of these devices and will younger people coming of age be more blasé about them in a healthy way? You look back at the history of any medium and the people who were there when it was developing, whether it was the telegraph or cable television or radio, thought, This is amazing, it's going change everything, or, The human community will finally be able to recognize each other and speak and be one - I mean, some people thought the telegraph or television would usher in world peace.

Television in America is so elaborate. There are so many remote cranes, and they have all the toys to play with. The directors are really good. They really work with you. So, I'm not really on set thinking, "Oh, my God, this is television. It's very different."

As an actor what you're always looking for is a character that is going to grow and change especially on television. I feel incredibly lucky to be working on a television show where the writing is always geared towards us growing and changing.

I am deeply honored that my team is being recognized by H.S.H. Prince Albert II and the Festival de Television de Monte-Carlo for Disney/ABC's role in creating television that inspires and captivates audiences wherever they live.

I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series.

Television has changed. The very nature of it is not even television anymore.

Television is a constant stream of fact, opinions, lies, moral dilemmas, plots: an infinitely complex and sophisticated torrent of information. How could it not make you cleverer? The only people who ever thought television rotted the brain and made kids dumb were those with a vested interest in other ways of learning, or those who were intellectually insecure, usually about books.

I got into television criticism because I thought it would be easier than film criticism. Film, you had to know 100 years of history, and TV you only had to know 40 when I started. And I thought, "Well, that's going to be so much easier." But film stayed pretty much the same. And television has changed so many times that my head hurts. So I made the wrong call there.

The heightened public clamor resulting from radio and television coverage will inevitably result in prejudice. Trial by television is, therefore, foreign to our system.

You don't really have time to do other than what's written. It's very rigid. Shows have a certain rhythm that nobody wants disturbed. So a lot of that doesn't take place on television, at least the television I was doing at the time when I first started.

There's so much good television now, and there's a lot of things on television that would have been a movie or maybe wouldn't have been made at all if it wasn't for cable and streaming. It's a really exciting part of the future and I really want to be a part of it.

I think that cinema and television have nothing in common. There is a breaking point between photography and cinema on the one hand and television and virtual reality on the other hand.

You can always spot a 'television personality', even when they aren't actually on television, because they carry their 'made-up' persona in front of them, like some sort of baffler, or Ready Brek force field. Their reach for notoriety predicated on that fulsome mediocrity of talent detailed above has become frozen in their faces.

Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure

Radio was, in a way, a very philosophical medium. You could make an argument on the radio, and people listened to it. Television is already harder because people's attention span becomes shorter with television. Cut to a commercial and all that.

I think it's brought the world a lot closer together, and will continue to do that. There are downsides to everything; there are unintended consequences to everything. The most corrosive piece of technology that I've ever seen is called television - but then, again, television, at its best, is magnificent.

There's so little difference between television and features as far as you make the film. I mean, you have less money and it's a little quicker, but the concept is all on television.

Now, all America sits in front of television sets and those television sets exude, I am sorry to say, a considerable amount of radioactive material. It's not huge, you know, but it's enough so that people who have made a habit of watching TV ... get the TV radiation.

I think anybody who has been in the theater, prefers it. Television is a... factory. You turn out things on a revolving assembly line. You don't have time to perfect anything in television.

The U.S. is telling the Northern Alliance to kill Taliban prisoners. It's totally a breach of all the known conventions of war. Western television networks aren't showing this, but Arab networks are showing how prisoners are being killed and what's being done to them. Instead, we're shown scenes that are deliberately created for the Western media: a few women without the veil, a woman reading the news on Kabul television, and 150 people cheering.

If your working television sits on top of your non-working television, you might be a redneck.

I wouldn't have the life I have without television. I wouldn't be looking out my apartment window onto the East River; I wouldn't be able to afford to have my mother with me this summer. So television has been very good to me.

It's funny, 90 percent of what I've done has been television, and I never really wanted to do it that much. I was really interested in film and theater. What's ironic is that when I started doing television, I did a bunch of amazing shows all in a row, starting with The Corner.

When you listen to Christian radio stations - and there are thousands of them now in the United States - and when you listen to Christian television networks - and there are thousands of Christian television shows across the country - they are all politically right.

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

Once in a while a good opportunity would come along, like the first 'Playhouse 90 ever to air - working in television afforded me my best opportunities. The (film) industry was going through such turmoil at the time - studios didn't know where to go anymore, they were falling apart, television was there. They didn't know what kind of films people wanted. The European films were making a huge impact because those films wanted real people in real situations.

Television is certainly a writers-led medium. They're the ones who are there, they're the ones that are conferencing or whatever, with directors coming and going.

TV can be an acronym for television or transvestite. I prefer using it to describe the the latter. The former is strange and undignified.

I love the stage. It's terrifying in a way that film and television is not. When you're about to go out, and you're adrenaline just gets out of control, and that can be really daunting.

The hope for me going back into television - after doing what will have been two years of radio - is to bring that authenticity with me. And, to not have the visual be overpowering the content.

There really is no foolproof or even optimal way of dealing with White House emissaries who tell whoppers on live television. On the one hand, there's value in hearing what our government has to say about its actions and vision for the future. On the other, news organizations are responsible for the factual hygiene of their product. In some cases, those two imperatives just aren't compatible.

Formula One gives a platform to companies like Rolex - and that's just in media space, watching television or reading newspapers, digital or physical. You see the brand in the context of the competition and bring it to the attention of everybody on a regular basis.

In truth, ayahuasca is the television of the forest.

When we graduated [ from Cambridge], we were grabbed right into television. I was grabbed straight into the practice of writing comedy. It was all writing and performing. You wrote something in order for you to perform it.

We read the world - television, movies, songs, books - and the people in it through the lens of our own lives.

See, I don't watch reality television anymore. I watched a little bit of it for awhile, but I found it turned my soul into a black sludge, and I just did not find it healthy or good for me at all, because I would watch it and be disgusted, disgusted.

Look at the declining television coverage. Look at the declining voting rate. Economics and economic news is what moves the country now, not politics.