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The human race is faced with a cruel choice: work or daytime television.
-Anon.
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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
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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
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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
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The failures of the press have contributed immensely to the emergence of a talk-show nation, in which public discourse is reduced to ranting and raving and posturing.
-Carl Bernstein
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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.
-Ray Bradbury
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TV is a fickle business. I'm only good for the length of my contract.
-Tom Brokaw
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Moral passion without entertainment is propaganda and entertainment without moral passion is television.
-Rita Mae Brown
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Television news is like a lightning flash. It makes a loud noise, lights up everything around it, leaves everything else in darkness and then is suddenly gone.
-William Hodding Carter, Jr.
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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
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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
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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 Baghdads of his dreams to rise from the dust.
-Salvador Dali
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Television thrives on unreason, and unreason thrives on television. It strikes at the emotions rather than the intellect.
-Sir Robin Day
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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
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I can think of nothing more boring for the American people than to have to sit in their living rooms for a whole half hour looking at my face on their television screens.
-Dwight D Eisenhower
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Television is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
-TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot
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Let's face it, there are no plain women on television.
-Anna Ford
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I got sick of turning on the TV and seeing my face.
-Michael J. Fox
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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
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Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home.
-Sir David Paradine Frost
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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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A three -- to four -- to five-hour experience with nothingness.
-Frederic Glezer
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Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay at home and see bad television for nothing?
-Samuel Goldwyn
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Television has brought back murder into the home -- where it belongs.
-Alfred Hitchcock
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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
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Books about Television
