Television

(277 votes)   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

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(136 votes)   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

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(128 votes)   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

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(125 votes)   TV -- chewing gum for the eyes.

Frank Lloyd Wright
1869-1959, American Architect

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(85 votes)   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(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

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(83 votes)   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

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(82 votes)   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

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(77 votes)   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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(76 votes)   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

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(75 votes)   Television was not invented to make human beings vacuous, but is an emanation of their vacuity.

Malcolm Muggeridge
1903-1990, British Broadcaster

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(75 votes)   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

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(73 votes)   The smallest bookstore still contains more ideas of worth than have been presented in the entire history of television.

Andrew Ross

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(70 votes)   A three -- to four -- to five-hour experience with nothingness.

Frederic Glezer

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(68 votes)   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.

E(lwyn) B(rooks) White
1899-1985, American Author, Editor

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(64 votes)   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

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