Smart Quotes about the TV

Few "It sits there in the corner of the living-room relentlessly transmitting its mosaic of life. Image after image, incident after incident, emotion after emotion, juxtaposed with anarchic, confused and irresponsible logic. A man, doused in petrol, sets fire to himself outside the White House. A dentist discovers a gas to destroy mankind. Which is true? Which is false? Does it matter?"
— Milton Shulman, The Ravenous Eye
"I have confidence in your health, but not in your product. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air, and stay there. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland."
— Newton Minow, Chairman of the FCC in remarks to the National Association of Broadcasters on May 9, 1961
"Television is chewing gum for the eyes."
— Frank Lloyd Wright, American architect
"Television is the first truly democratic culture — the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want."
— Clive Barnes, American film and television critic
"Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn't have in your home."
— David Frost, British broadcaster and writer
"In any conflict, it can now fairly be said, there are three sides — A, B and TV."
— Roy MacGregor, Canadian columnist
"How can one govern without television?"
— André Malraux, French author and government minister
"The villain, the enemy, is the camera. We who are accustomed to working with it know that it is capable of infinite deception, probably the greatest of all deceptions, and yet is accepted as having some kind of objective truth in it."
— Malcolm Muggeridge, British-born critic and broadcaster
"I don't believe in the power of television. No one is ever influenced by television who doesn't want to be."
— Eamonn Andrews, British broadcaster
"Television will no longer be the medium of a small elite, programming for the masses. It will be the forum through which the many segments of the community will be able to talk to each other, a medium for everybody."
— Dorothy Todd Henant, Canadian producer
"This instrument, television, it can entertain, it can inform, yes, and it can even inspire. But it all depends on the will of the humans who operate it. Otherwise it is just lights and wires in a box."
— Edward R. Murrow, American news reporter
"Television is the literature of the illiterate, the culture of the low-brow, the wealth of the poor, the privilege of the underprivileged, the exclusive club of the excluded masses."
— Lee Lovinger

"The potential audience of television in its ultimate development may reasonably be expected to be limited only by the population of the earth itself."
— RCA Chairman David Sarnoff, 1931