#levi

The essence of capitalism is to turn nature into commodities and commodities into capital. The live green earth is transformed into dead gold bricks, with luxury items for the few and toxic slag heaps for the many. The glittering mansion overlooks a vast sprawl of shanty towns, wherein a desperate, demoralized humanity is kept in line with drugs, television, and armed force. ↗

— Michael Parenti

#drugs #humanity #miltary #nature #television

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside. ↗

— Jonathan Lethem

#modernism #pop-culture #postmodernism #television #writing

The certain prospect of death could sweeten every life with a precious and fragrant drop of levity; and now you strange apothecary souls have turned it into an ill-tasting drop of poison that makes the whole of life repulsive. ↗

— Friedrich Nietzsche

#death #levity #poison #souls #death

The amount of educational programming on television today is simply desensitizing. The only reason left to go to school is to see gun violence. ↗

— Bauvard

#education #funny #gun-violence #humor #television

Intellectual and moral growth is no less indispensable than material improvement. Knowledge is a viaticum. Though is a prime necessity; truth is nourishment, like wheat. A reasoning faculty, deprived of knowledge and wisdom, pines away. We should feel the same pity for minds that do not eat as for stomachs. If there be anything sadder than a body perishing for want of bread, it is a mind dying of hunger for lack of light. All progress tends toward the solution. Some day, people will be amazed. As the human race ascends, the deepest layers will naturally emerge from the zone of distress. The effacement of wretchedness will be effected by a simple elevation level. ↗

— Victor Hugo

#morality #poverty-alleviation #education

5. Television is of great educational value. It teaches you while still really young how to (a) kill, (b) rob, (c) embezzle, (d) shoot, (e) poison, and generally speaking, (f) how to grow up into a Wild West outlaw or gangster by the time you leave school. 6. Television puts a stop to crime because all the burglars and robbers, instead of going to burgle and rob, sit at home watching The Lone Ranger, Emergency Ward Ten and Dotto. ↗

— George Mikes

#television #education

I'm the idiot box. I'm the TV. I'm the all-seeing eye and the world of the cathode ray. I'm the boob tube. I'm the little shrine the family gathers to adore.' You're the television? Or someone in the television?' The TV's the altar. I'm what people are sacrificing to.' What do they sacrifice?' asked Shadow. Their time, mostly,' said Lucy. 'Sometimes each other.' She raised two fingers, blew imaginary gunsmoke from the tips. Then she winked, a big old I Love Lucy wink. You're a God?' said Shadow. Lucy smirked, and took a ladylike puff of her cigarette. 'You could say that,' she said. ↗

— Neil Gaiman

#television #family

We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground... Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments. ↗

— Wes Jackson

#television #values #family