Quotes About the Boob Tube for World Television Day

Because every day is a TV day

Since television was invented, people have been pontificating about how the medium affects society. Is there too much violence on television? Too much sex? Does it encourage children to eat too much sugar or act out in antisocial ways? These questions have been part of an ongoing debate that will probably not be resolved any time soon. But what the pontificators do agree on is that television does have some influence on society, which is why the United Nations made November 21 World Television Day. These quotes tackle the influence of television, for better or for worse.

1. “Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.” -Bill Hicks

2. “Did you ever get the feeling that the world was a tuxedo and you were a pair of brown shoes?” -George Gobel

3. “TV is bigger than any story it reports. It’s the greatest teaching tool since the printing press.” -Fred W. Friendly

4. “The best thing on television the other night was a meadowlark on my neighbor’s antenna.” -William D. Tammeus

5. “On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead.” -Stephen Chbosky

6. “I always say film is art, theater is life, and television is furniture.” -Kenny Leon

7. “If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?” -Warren Ellis

8. “Television is the menace that everyone loves to hate, but can’t seem to live without.” -Paddy Chayefsky

9. “Even the bad of television has its good: The worse the program is for children, the quieter it keeps them.” -Evan Esar

10. “If television’s a babysitter, the Internet is a drunk librarian who won’t shut up.” -Dorothy Gambrell

11. “People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.” -Jess C. Scott

12. “If your working television sits on top of your non-working television, you might be a redneck.” -Jeff Foxworthy

13. “Every time you think television has hit its lowest ebb, a new program comes along to make you wonder where you thought the ebb was.” -Art Buchwald

14. “Do you know we are being led to slaughters by placid admirals and fats slow generals are? Getting obscene on young blood? Do you know we are ruled by TV?” -Jim Morrison

15. “All television is educational television. The question is: What is it teaching?” -Nicholas Johnson

16. “We’re all watching each other, so there’s no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.” -Ray Bradbury

17. “I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts. But I can’t stop eating peanuts.” -Orson Welles

18. “If a man watches three football games in a row, he should be declared legally dead.” -Erma Bombeck

19. “Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.” -Radiohead

20. “Television: A medium. So called because it’s neither rare nor well done.” -Ernie Kovacs

21. “The television is ‘real’. It is immediate, it has dimension. It tells you what to think and blasts it in. It must be right. It seems so right. It rushes you on so quickly to its own conclusions your mind hasn’t time to protest, ‘What nonsense!’.” -Ray Bradbury

22. “I have seen some good things on TV, but watching it now and then is not the same thing as the indiscriminate gluing of the eye to the screen that some people do all day, all night, using up time that goes by and will never come again….I think such addiction to the screen is a crime against life itself….” -Cid Ricketts Sumner

23. “I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.” -Gore Vidal

24. “Television is a triumph of equipment over people, and the minds that control it are so small that you could put them in a gnat’s navel with room left over for two caraway seeds and an agent’s heart.” -Fred Allen

25. “Television makes so much at its worst that it can’t afford to do its best.” -Fred W. Friendly

26. “Television was not intended to make human beings vacuous, but it is an emanation of their vacuity.” -Malcolm Muggeridge

27. “Watching television is dosing one’s self with great jugs of that modern Mrs. Winslow’s Soothing Syrup.” -Cid Ricketts Sumner

28. “Seeing a murder on television…can help work off one’s antagonisms. And if you haven’t any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.” -Alfred Hitchcock

29. “On cable TV, they have a weather channel — 24 hours of weather. We had something like that where I grew up. We called it a window.” -Dan Spencer

30. “If you want to use television to teach somebody, you must first teach them how to use television.” -Umberto Eco

31. “It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you’re on.” -Alfred Hitchcock

32. “Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America — not on the battlefields of Vietnam.” -Marshall McLuhan

33. “Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they’re scraping the top of the barrel.” -Gore Vidal

34. “TV is changing the American child from an irresistible force to an immovable object.” -Unknown

35. “A soap opera is a television serial about a family that never spends its time watching a television serial.” -Evan Esar

36. “Television? The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.” -C.P. Scott

37. “Television is chewing gum for the eyes.” -Frank Lloyd Wright

38. “Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.” -Ann Landers

39. “Television has raised writing to a new low.” -Samuel Goldwyn

40. “It costs only a penny an hour to operate your TV set, and there are times when it’s worth it.” -Arnold H. Glasow

41. “Television is a medium of entertainment, and a tedium of advertising.” -Evan Esar

42. “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

43. “Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD.” -Jeff Lindsay

44. “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

45. “Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.” -Eugenio Montale

46. “Conversation like television set on honeymoon…unnecessary.” -Peter Sellers

47. “Television is basically teaching whether you want it to or not.” -Jim Henson

48. “Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.” -Alfred Hitchcock

49. “TV is like theater. You can’t enjoy it without a program.” -Walter Annenberg

50. “Time has convinced me of one thing. Television is for appearing on, not looking at.” -Noël Coward

More from Kiki Wellington:

Sources:

Quotations about Television and Watching TV. The Quote Garden. https://www.quotegarden.com/television.html

Television Quotes. BrainyQuote. https://www.brainyquote.com/topics/television-quotes

Television Quotes. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/tag/television

TV Sayings and Quotes. Wise Sayings. https://www.wisesayings.com/tv-quotes/

World Television Day — November 21, 2022. National Today. https://nationaltoday.com/world-television-day/