Television Watching Quotes

• Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.

  Bill Hicks

  Inspirational, Funny, Eye

  90 Copy quote

• If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well viewed.

  Lily Tomlin

  Book, Watching Tv, Watches

  56 Copy quote

• Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.

  Andy Warhol

  War, Live Life, Commercial Art

  Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.104, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

  54 Copy quote

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• We owe a lot to Thomas Edison - if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight.

  Milton Berle

  Funny, Humor, Luck

  32 Copy quote

• Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative.

  Edward Hirsch

  Reading, Intellectual, Junk

  4 Copy quote

• Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

  Neil Postman

  Skills, Television, Watching Television

  Neil Postman (2011). “Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future”, p.201, Vintage

  7 Copy quote

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• [An audience conditioned by a lifetime of television-watching is so corrupted that] their standards have been systematically lowered over the years. These guys sit in front of their sets and the gamma rays eat the white cells of their brains out!

  Woody Allen

  Cells, Years, White

  7 Copy quote

• Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

  Sidney Poitier

  Children, Kids, Cutting

  Sidney Poitier (2009). “The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography”, p.6, Harper Collins

  52 Copy quote

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• Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure

  Witold Rybczynski

  Eye, Ears, Way

  8 Copy quote

• Again and again parents describe...the trancelike nature of their children's television watching. The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth. The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look.

  Marie Winn

  Children, Eye, Expression

  18 Copy quote

• Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it also engages and exercises the brain. Today's youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active.

  Richard M. Nixon

  Reading, Exercise, Leader

  4 Copy quote

• I was always singing and dancing for my mother when I wasn't glued to the television watching I Love Lucy or the Carol Burnett Show.

  Debra Messing

  Mother, Dancing, Singing

  7 Copy quote

• The six and one-fourth hours' television watching (the American average per day) which non-reading children do is what is called alpha-level learning. The mind needn't make any pictures since the pictures are provided, so the mind cuts current as low as it can.

  Carol Bly

  Children, Reading, Cutting

  Carol Bly (1990). “The passionate, accurate story: making your heart's truth into literature”

  4 Copy quote

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• The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.

  Russell Baker

  Book, Reading, Ambition

  4 Copy quote