An aphorism is nothing else but the slightest
QUOTES AND APHORISMS ON TELEVISION
Television knows no night. It is perpetual day. TV embodies our fear of the dark, of night, of the other side of things.
Jean Baudrillard (French postmodern philosopher, writer)
In the past, to subjugate the people, the powerful
used force, laws and religion; now, they also have football and television.
There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you.
Jean Baudrillard (French postmodern philosopher, writer)
Sometimes, because of its immediacy, television produces a kind of electronic parable. Berlin, for instance, on the day the Wall was opened. Rostropovich was playing his cello by the Wall that no longer cast a shadow, and a million East Berliners were thronging to the West to shop with an allowance given them by West German banks! At that moment the whole world saw how materialism had lost its awesome historic power and become a shopping list.
John Berger (1926-, British actor, critic)
TV is a fickle business. I'm only good for the length of my contract.
Tom Brokaw (1940-, American TV personality)
So by all means let's have a television show quick and long, even if the commercial has to be delivered by a man in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck, selling ergot pills. After all, the public is entitled to what it wants, isn't it? The Romans knew that and even they lasted four hundred years after they started to putrefy.
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959, American author)
Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959, American author)
What is a television apparatus to man, who has only to shut his eyes to see the most inaccessible regions of the seen and the never seen, who has only to imagine in order to pierce through walls and cause all the planetary Baghdad's of his dreams to rise from the dust.
Salvador Dali (1904-1989, Spanish painter)
Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. It strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.
Sir Robin Day
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 (1941-, American author, columnist)
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 (1888-1965, American-born British poet, critic)
Let's face it, there are no plain women on television.
Anna Ford
I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.
Michael J. Fox (1961-, Canadian-born American actor)
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your Living room by people you wouldn't have in your house.
David Frost
Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your Living room by people you wouldn't have in your house.
David Frost
Television is an excellent system when one has nothing to lose, as is the case with a nomadic and rootless country like the United States, but in Europe the affect of television is that of a bulldozer which reduces culture to the lowest possible denominator.
Marc Fumaroli
A three -- to four -- to five-hour experience with nothingness.
Frederic Glezer
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)
There's a good deal in common between the mind's eye and the TV screen, and though the TV set has all too often been the boobtube, it could be, it can be, the box of dreams.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-, American author)
We can put television in its proper light by supposing that Gutenberg's great invention had been directed at printing only comic books.
Robert M. Hutchins (1899-1977, American university president)
Anyone afraid of what he thinks television does to the world is probably just afraid of the world.
Clive James (1939-, Australian-born writer, satirist, broadcaster, and critic)
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 (1919-, American film critic)
Television, despite its enormous presence, turns out to have added pitifully few lines to the communal memory.
Justin Kaplan
Do not, on a rainy day, ask your child what he feels like doing, because I assure you that what he feels like doing, you won't feel like watching.
Fran Lebowitz (1951-, American journalist)
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-, American author)
I find television very educational. Every time someone switches it on, I go into another room and read a good book.
Groucho Marx (1895-1977, American comic actor)
I made a pact with myself a long time ago: Never watch anything stupider than you. It's helped me a lot.
Bette Midler (1945-, American singer, entertainer, actress)
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 (1915-, American dramatist)
Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.
Malcolm Muggeridge (1903-1990, British broadcaster)
Much of what passes for quality on British television is no more than a reflection of the narrow elite which controls it and has always thought that its tastes were synonymous with quality.
Rupert Murdoch (1931-, Australian-born American media magnate)
Television is actually closer to reality than anything in books. The madness of TV is the madness of human life.
Camille Paglia (1947-, American author, critic, educator)
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 (1938-, American author)
Man watches his history on the screen with apathy and an occasional passing flicker of horror or indignation.
Conor Cruise O'Brien (1917-, Irish historian, critic, and statesman)
Already we Viewers, when not viewing, have begun to whisper to one another that the more we elaborate our means of communication, the less we communicate.
J. B. Priestley (1894-1984, American writer)
The great networks are there to prove that ideas can be canned like spaghetti. If everything ends up by tasting like everything else, is that not the evidence that it has been properly cooked?
Frederic Raphael (1931-, British author, critic)
Performing doesn't turn me on. It's an egomaniac business, filled with prima donnas -- including this one.
Dan Rather (1931-, American TV personality)
The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.
Andrew Ross
Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.
Nathalie Sarraute (1902-1999, Russian writer)
People assume you can't be shy and be on television. They're wrong.
Diane Sawyer (1945-, American TV personality)
The answers to life's problems aren't at the bottom of a bottle, they're on TV!
Homer Simpson
If we had had the right technology back then, you would have seen Eva Braun on "The Donahue Show" and Adolf Hitler on "Meet the Press."
Ed Turner
Television -- a medium. So called because it is neither rare nor well done.
Author Unknown
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can't stop eating peanuts.
Orson Welles (1915-1985, American film maker)
Television hangs on the questionable theory that whatever happens anywhere should be sensed everywhere. If everyone is going to be able to see everything, in the long run all sights may lose whatever rarity value they once possessed, and it may well turn out that people, being able to see and hear practically everything, will be specially interested in almost nothing.
Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985, American author, editor)
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.
Elwyn Brooks White (1899-1985, American author, editor)
TV -- chewing gum for the eyes.
Frank Lloyd Wright (1869-1959, American architect)
What do a few lies on TV matter? They can be swallowed, digested and excreted, or follow people when they doze off to sink into oblivion.
Zhang Jie
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