#television

The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone in front of the tube, you know. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone. ↗

— Noam Chomsky

#beauty

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. ↗

— Kurt Vonnegut

#community #competition #giftedness #modern #printing-press

Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead. ↗

— Chuck Palahniuk

#death-and-dying #humor #humorous #humorous-quotations #internet

I spent my time drinking and staring at a television in the airport bar. More death and destruction. Crime. Pollution. All the news stories were telling me to be frightened. All the commercials were telling me to buy things I didn´t need. The message was that people could only be passive victims or consumers. ↗

— John Twelve Hawks

#consumer #news #television #tv #death

The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming. ↗

— Arundhati Roy

#saturation #sight #television #design

...and he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within. ↗

— Hubert Selby Jr.

#television #dreams

A democratic civilization will save itself only if it makes the language of the image into a stimulus for critical reflection — not an invitation for hypnosis. ↗

— Umberto Eco

#images #mass-media #reflection #symbols #television

Television has greater power over the lives of most Americans than any educational system, government, or church. ↗

— Kent Hughes

#education

At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents... ↗

— Elizabeth Wurtzel

#society #television #family

On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead. ↗

— Stephen Chbosky

#funny #reading #television #funny