American Television Quotes & Sayings

I didn't watch a lot of American television growing up. I just liked to read a lot and watch movies - movies, movies, and more movies. My family used to make fun of me because I'd like every movie I saw. — Joss Whedon

Latin, as we all know, ultimately broke down into Spanish, Italian, French, and so on. One wonders whether there will be an imperial parallel with English breaking down into, shall we say, North American, European, Australian, and so on. On the other hand, there is this immense, inward-driving influence of radio and television that is bringing us all back together. One could say it's a fight between the two: a fight between regionalism and the standardization through communication. — William Golding

American culture has regressed because of contemporary society's glorification of making a good living and spending free time in media activities rather than constantly devoting themselves to a learning and self-improvement. The combination of grooming youngsters to fit into a commercial workplace and Americans willingness to submit themselves to endless hours of watching television shows filled with murders, violence, sex, and replete with advertisements that promote the goods of commercial giants has eroded the American spirit and contributed to lack of an intellectually sophisticated populous. — Kilroy J. Oldster

Rachael Ray is probably the most watched kitchen personality in the history of American television. — Bill Buford

That happiness is to be attained through limitless material acquisition is denied by every religion and philosophy known to mankind, but is preached incessantly by every American television set. — Robert Neelly Bellah

Any writer who presents an American home today where the television is not the head of the family is living in a fantasy world. — Kurt Vonnegut

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

Canadian cities looked the way American cities did on television. — William Gibson

By the twelfth day of his fast, Raju himself has become a tourist attraction. Before an enormous crowd and an American television crew, the starving man is helped down to the drought-stricken river to pray: — R.K. Narayan

The Simpsons is the best thing on American television. — Stephen Hawking

Opera on television in Europe is very important. If you think about it in the broadest sense: a lot of the dramas made in India with music are practically operas. They're not sung but they have a very big appeal. I don't know why American television people are so stupid but at the moment, they just seem to have some sort of a block. They just do what they do and they do it for a certain number of years. Then it wears out and they try something else. It's just a matter of time I think. — Robert Ashley

My parents found what I was interested in and encouraged me. They didn't put me in front of a television and buy lots of toys, the way some American parents do. — Nastassja Kinski

I wanted to branch out into American television, specifically because you get to develop a character for a longer period of time and you get to develop a relationship with the audience. — Joseph Morgan

The landscape is television has changed so much, because there are so many outlets, that the odds of getting a zeitgeisty hit - you know how 'American Idol' seems to appeal to every human being on the planet? Doing that in comedy nowadays is very, very hard. — Bill Lawrence

The future is now! Soon every American home will integrate their television, phone and computer. You'll be able to visit the Louvre on one channel, or watch female wrestling on another. You can do your shopping at home, or play Mortal Kombat with a friend from Vietnam. There's no end to the possibilities! — Jim Carrey

The good thing is that I really think that American television is in kind of a second golden age. Even though there's a lot of reality and all those contest shows, which aren't my kind of shows, the scripted stuff that's going on is so good right now because of basic cable. Everyone has stepped it up and realised that people like quality. — Paul Feig

'American Idol' has changed the face of television. — Jennifer Hudson

By the age of 18, the average American has witnessed 200,000 acts of violence on television, most of them occurring during Game 1 of an NHL playoff series. — Steve Rushin

I don't know of any American playwrights who earn the bulk of their living writing plays. Many of the older ones teach, while a growing number of younger ones write for series television. — Terry Teachout

I guess probably in my time in politics, it continued to be affirmed to me that the African-American community, despite being subscription television's most valuable customers, they are very underserved by cable and satellite television programming options. — J. C. Watts

Old ladies photographed by CBS who announced that they would die of malnutrition if Reagan's bill were passed could probably have saved themselves their impending penury by the simple device of applying to the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists for scale every time they were featured by Dan Rather or whoever. — William F. Buckley Jr.

Any candidate who suggests that too many people are going to jail for too long will be targeted in an opponent's television ads as "soft on crime" and booted out of office. The result is that the United States imprisons far more people than it should, with disproportionate harm falling on African American communities who have been stripped of large numbers of men. A — Steven Pinker

What I can say that's different in American television ... in Britain, they wouldn't cancel something after a couple of episodes. In the States they would. They would just decide it's not working, take it off and put something else in on the fall schedule. — John Barrowman

The defining characteristic of today's intellectual and media elite is that it swims merrily in a sea of fantasy. The world of television is essentially a fantasy world, and television is today's [1980's] common denominator of communication, today's unifying American experience. This has frightening implications for the future. Ideas that fit on bumper stickers are not ideas at all, they simply are attitudes. And attitudinizing is no substitute for analysis. Unfortunately, too often television is to news as bumper stickers are to philosophy, and this has a corrosive effect on public understanding of those issues on which national survival may depend. — Richard M. Nixon

When you have the first show set in India on American television, there's gonna be a Nervous Nellie kind of vibe. — Parvesh Cheena

Most Australians who've got an ear can do an American accent because we grow up listening to them on television and in movies. — Jacki Weaver

In matters outside the courtroom, courts have decried differential treatment between print and broadcast media. New York City mayoral candidates Mario Cuomo and Edward Koch tried to exclude selected members of the media in 1977 by limiting access to their campaign headquarters to those who had received invitations. Ruling in American Broadcasting Cos. v. Cuomo, a federal court observed, "once there is a public function, public comment, and participation by some of the media, the First Amendment requires equal access to all of the media or the rights of the First Amendment would no longer be tenable."44
In 1981, a federal court in Georgia struck down a judge's order excluding television crews from a White House press pool. The court said the order violated the press and public's First Amendment right of access to White House events. It felt television coverage "provides a comprehensive visual element and an immediacy, or simultaneous aspect, not found in print — Marjorie Cohn

One result of this productive system is that the middle class has grown from being about 15 percent of the population in 1920 to being 86 percent of the population in 2011. While some of the population always seem to live at the poverty line, the vast majority of Americans today are affluent compared to their grandparents. They have the money to buy the products produced by American industry. In the process, the definition of poverty has changed. The majority of Americans who are classified by the government as living at the poverty level have indoor plumbing, color television sets, cell phones, air-conditioning, washers and dryers, microwaves, automobiles, and access to free health care. They are also a significant buying group. — Arthur Hughes

Anyone who watches a lot of television, or listens to pop music, is familiar with a certain vision of America. If not exactly colorblind, this America is one in which different races easily interact, in which a white person might have an Asian boss, Hispanic stepson, or African-American frenemy. — Wesley Morris

I hope there's a window that opens in American television where the rest of the world is viewed in a less censored light. There is something about the world outside the United States that is not understood here - that seems threatening to Americans. — Rula Jebreal

The best of American television is thought-provoking, original, brilliant, exciting - from 'The Sopranos' on, whether it's 'The Wire' or 'Breaking Bad' or 'House of Cards,' they're fantastic pieces of art. — Martin Freeman

I've been watching American baseball on television for a long time, but it was only in recent years that, realistically, I've been thinking about playing here. — Hideki Matsui

Well, certainly I think American television is - that's proper TV. — Graham Norton

The American child, driven to school by bus and stupefied by television, is losing contact with reality. There is an enormous gap between the sheer weight of the textbooks that he carries home from school and his capacity to interpret what is in them. — Marguerite Yourcenar

We cannot negotiate with people who say what's mine is mine and what's yours is negotiable.
[ The Berlin Crisis: Radio and Television Address to the American People (The White House, July 25, 1961)] — John F. Kennedy

A landmark 2007 report by the American Psychological Association (APA) found girls being sexualized--or treated as "objects of sexual desire... as things rather than as people with legitimate sexual feelings of their own"--in virtually every form of media, including movies, television, music videos and lyrics, video games and the Internet, advertising, cartoons, clothing, and toys. Even Dora the Explorer, once a cute, square-bodied child, got a makeover to make her look more svelte and "hot. — Nancy Jo Sales

By the age of six the average child will have completed the basic American education ... From television, the child will have learned how to pick a lock, commit a fairly elaborate bank holdup, prevent wetness all day long, get the laundry twice as white, and kill people with a variety of sophisticated armaments. — John F. Kennedy

I'm not seeing tough questions asked on American television. I'm not seeing those correspondents that would question those in power. It's like a club. We are not asking the tough questions. — Jorge Ramos

The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The "death play" of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels. — Richard J. Borden

When I'm on television, I'm talking to millions of people, so the conversation is totally different. My words are different. My diction is different because now I'm really talking American English and not homeboy English. — Keyshawn Johnson

I'm used to American actors who have a movie career thinking television acting is beneath them. — Alan Ball

The average American watches more than four hours of television per day. What would happen if we spent more time developing our talents than watching others develop theirs? — John Bytheway

The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization. — Fredric Jameson

Adeline hadn't owned a television since 1992.
She'd suffered fifteen years hearing about how the Internet would transform American culture and open new avenues of expression.
But in the end, it was only more people talking about television. — Jarett Kobek

American television tends to move faster than European or U.K. television. — Jason Winston George

There's definitely a wave of Brits doing great work on American television, and I wouldn't mind being one of them! — Rob James-Collier

It's [Into the Badlands] something that's very, very different and I think that's why it divided critics initially because they didn't understand it or get it. They didn't understand or have a knowledge of what we were trying to do. Bringing in the Asian martial arts aesthetic to American television. For us, these are the people who will make the show a hit or a failure in future seasons. So it's for us to respect them and interact and see what they have to say. — Miles Millar

As slavery died for the greater good of America, and the movement for equality sputtered to life, the white woman was on the cover of every American magazine. She was the dazzling jewel on every movie screen, the glory of every commercial and television show. — Jill Scott

In television, the audience has to be comfortable with you, and I've managed to prove that I can be in American homes to some degree, and not necessarily where everyone knows me, either. — Bruce Boxleitner

[Into the Badlands] wasn't going to be two days of a splinter unit at the end of the shoot. The action and the martial arts had to be integral to the show. That's what makes it unique, that's what makes it special and different and ground-breaking. No one has attempted this before on American television. — Miles Millar

I think you had the GOP down there in North Carolina reaching out to African-American voters and this guy coming on television and using the N-word and saying what Don Yelton said. — Aasif Mandvi

I think good-looking people seldom make good television. And American television studios almost concede before they start: 'Well, it won't be good, but at least it'll be good-looking. We'll have nice-looking girls in tight shirts with F.B.I. badges and fit-looking guys with lots of hair gel vaulting over things.' — Hugh Laurie

When I was in power, I found that experts can't be trusted. For this simple reason: unlike tyrants, they are under no delusion that a country, a people is their body. Under this delusion a tyrant takes everything personally. An expert takes nothing personally. Nothing is ever precisely his fault. If a bridge collapses, or a war miscarries, he has already walked away. He still has his expertise. Also,
people imagine that because a thing is big, it has had a great deal of intelligent thought given to it. This is not true. A big idea is even more apt to be wrong than a small one, because the scale is inorganic. The Great Wall, for instance, is extremely stupid. The two biggest phenomena in the world right now are Maoism and American television, and both are extremely stupid. — John Updike

Paradoxically, our imperial global Anglo-American language is dull with the glitter of its own decay. In response, the new meta- physical poet might consider the following cleansing strategies: keep faith with the canonical writers of the past, study Homeric Greek, excavate etymologies, embrace threatened languages, practice the fine art of translation, listen regularly to the musical flow of the breath and the beat of the heart, switch off the television, become a votary of silence.
Here lies the beginning of freedom. — Peter Abbs

Since the reading skills of the American people are the lowest in the First World, the general public is always easy prey to manipulation by television. — Gore Vidal

By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets. — Richard Russo

The biggest police gun battle ever to take place on American soil had begun, and it was on live television. - — Jeffrey Toobin

In general, it's not too hard to corrupt an American, mostly a matter of supply to their demand. Supply should be variegated to encourage the Illusion of Choice. Other than that they're looking for numbness, so be ready to sedate. Drugs, booze, television, shopping, etc ... — Geoffrey Wood

I think American television changed world television in its reinvention of the series. — Julian Fellowes

One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia. — Robert C. Merton

Television is like the American toaster, you push the button and the same thing pops up everytime. — Alfred Hitchcock

ISIS is a formidable foe, but the counter forces to it have only just begun and if these forces, the Iraqi army, the Kurdish Peshmerga, American air power, the Syrian Free Army, work in a coordinated fashion, it will start losing ground. Also, please keep in mind that ISIS does not actually hold as much ground as the many maps flashed on television keep showing. Large parts of those territories that ISIS supposedly controls are vacant desert. — Fareed Zakaria

I used to watch a lot of American and British television as a child, which helped teach me the language and accents; it was partly that which landed me the part of Roxy in a London production of 'Chicago' when I was 25. — Birgitte Hjort Sorensen

That was an ordinary way for a patriotic American to talk back then. It's hard to believe how sick of war we used to be.[ ... ]We used to call armaments manufacturers "Merchants of Death."
Can you imagine that?
Nowadays, of course, just about our only solvent industry is the merchandising of death, bankrolled by our grandchildren, so that the message of our principal art forms, movies and television and political speeches and newspaper columns, for the sake of the economy, simply has to be this: War is hell, all right, but the only way a boy can become a man is in a shoot-out of some kind, preferably, but by no means necessarily, on a battlefield. — Kurt Vonnegut

Television is something the Russians invented to destroy American education. — Paul Erdos

That makes entertaining television. That is the circus of American Idol . We go for the very, very best and the very, very worst. It's the boring people that we don't want to see on television. — Nigel Lythgoe

In its effect on family relationships, in its facilitation of parental withdrawal from an active role in the socialization of their children, and in its replacement of family rituals and special events, television has played an important role in the disintegration of the American family. — Marie Winn

The future of American film lies on television. — David Hare

I look in the eyes and I see the heart. As long as it's a human story. I would like to turn on my television and see African American, Hispanic, Asian as well as Caucasian. And I think there are probably more people like me. — Angela Bassett

We attempt to remember our collective American childhood, the way it was, but what we often remember is a combination of real past, pieces reshaped by bitterness and love, and, of course, the video past
the portrayals of family life on such television programs as "Leave it to Beaver" and "Father Knows Best" and all the rest. — Richard Louv

Television's escapist programming naturally continues to endorse living beyond one's means as the time-tested American Way and rarely depicts families or individuals wracked by the pressures and miseries that come with excess. — Tom Shales

I consider the television set as the American fireplace, around which the whole family will gather. — Red Skelton

MTV essentially killed 'American Bandstand' and 'Solid Gold,' because music videos are an easier way for pop artists to gain television exposure. — Don Cornelius

You talk like American television. — Patrick Ness

I would say my being disheartened has more to do with American culture than anything else. We are becoming a very shallow culture. My goodness, the celebrity ethos has taken over completely. Turn on the television and you see that over and over. There's very little substance. And so, everything gets shorter. Everything is entertainment oriented. Our churches reflect that. A thirty-five minute sermon without a Power Point or video clips is rare these days. That's not true in other countries so much. — Philip Yancey

I would love to get a role that changes the landscape of being an African American woman in television and film. — Candice Patton

Snow n ... 2.a. Anything resembling snow. b. The white specks on a television
screen resulting from weak reception.
crash v ... -infr ... 5, To fail suddenly, as a business or an economy. -
The American Heritage Dictionary
virus ... [L. virus slimy liquid, poison, offensive odour or taste.] 1.
Venom, such as is emitted by a poisonous animal. 2. Path. a. A morbid
principle or poisonous substance produced in the body as the result of some
disease, esp. one capable of being introduced into other persons or animals by
inoculations or otherwise and of developing the same disease in them ... 3.
fig. A moral or intellectual poison, or poisonous influence. -The Oxford
English Dictionary — Neal Stephenson

Ratings to me are a little like the Chinese Government. I don't fully understand what makes a rating go. I don't know what makes the American television audience respond to one person and not t another. There very seldom are great differences between many television personalities. — Tom Brokaw

I think it's only in a crisis that Americans see other people. It has to be an American crisis, of course. If two countries fight that do not supply the Americans with some precious commodity, then the education of the public does not take place. But when the dictator falls, when the oil is threatened, then you turn on the television and they tell you where the country is, what the language is, how to pronounce the names of the leaders, what the religion is all about, and maybe you can cut out recipes in the newspaper of Persian dishes. — Don DeLillo

Playing a positive role on a network television show, it was great. I took it as a responsibility. Poncherello was supposed to be Poncherelli, and then when I got this part I said, 'You know what, this guy isn't going to be Italian-American, he's gonna be Hispanic American.' And they went with it. — Erik Estrada

A telling example of what it has all come to can be found in the person of Rick Santorum, the junior Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Elected to the House in 1990 and then the Senate in 1994, Santorum, forty, is the apotheosis of the brash newer member who imposes himself on the working order of the Senate, demonstrates little respect for the institution, becomes a one-man ideological enforcer, and brings down the level of civility. Toothy, with a shock of dark hair, Santorum looks the perfect pol for the television age. Unburdened by brilliance, he makes his impact through pestiferousness. — Elizabeth Drew

Whereas Absurdism in Europe seemed a logical, almost inevitable response to the irrationality of war, the analogous elements that surfaced in American drama seemed more a response to a materialist society run amok. The American-style Absurdism seemed to spring full-blown out of television advertisements and situation comedies, which had become new myth-making machines. — Arnold Aronson

It's the open ocean right now because it's so unique. It's a really unique way of doing American television. There are a million possibilities. We can stay with the cops. We can introduce new worlds. And, who knows where it will end. — Veena Sud

I did not see myself as a leading lady. I thought I was really funny-looking and I would never be the lead, and I certainly would never do film or television. I wanted to do theater. I wanted to be the grand dame of the American stage. — Kathy Baker

American Wedding

In america,
I place my ring
on your cock
where it belongs.
No horsemen
bearing terror,
no soldiers of doom
will swoop in
and sweep us apart.
They're too busy
looting the land
to watch us.
They don't know
we need each other
critically.
They expect us to call in sick,
watch television all night,
die by our own hands.
They don't know
we are becoming powerful.
Every time we kiss
we confirm the new world coming.

What the rose whispers
before blooming
I vow to you.
I give you my heart,
a safe house.
I give you promises other than
milk, honey, liberty.
I assume you will always
be a free man with a dream.
In america,
place your ring
on my cock
where it belongs.
Long may we live
to free this dream. — Essex Hemphill

There's no mistaking the fact that some of the best longform fiction out there now is in American television. 'The Wire' and 'Deadwood' and 'The Sopranos.' — Kevin Barry

I grew up watching a lot of American television and so the American sound has been in my psyche somehow for a long time and is quite familiar and so that does make it easier. — Toni Collette

I really wanted to work in the American industry because it's the leading industry. It's where film and television started. — Jason Gann

France has not only built a bureaucratic barrier against American culture, it has constructed a notorious intellectual case against it as well. The French spend hundreds of millions of dollars subsidizing film production, extend interest-free loans to designated filmmakers, and have placed quotas not only on imports but on television time. — Tyler Cowen

Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world ... and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood. — Hunter S. Thompson

Everything has changed in recent decades - the economy, technology, cultural attitudes, the demographics of the workforce, the role of women in society and the structure of the American family. It's about time our laws caught up. We watch 'Modern Family' on television, but we're still living by 'Leave It To Beaver' rules. — Thomas Perez

I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit. — Stephen King

American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really. — Richard Ayoade

Hence also the weird viewer complicity behind TV's sham "breakthrough programs": Joe Briefcase needs that PR-patina of "freshness" and "outrageousness" to quiet his conscience while he goes about getting from television what we've all been trained to want from it: some strangely American, profoundly shallow, and eternally temporary reassurance. — David Foster Wallace

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

When was the last time you bought an American-made radio or television? If you're Gen X or younger, the answer is 'never.' Does the label on that shirt or skirt you're wearing say 'Made in the U.S.A.'? If so, you probably got it at Goodwill, or maybe at a Smithsonian garage sale. — Seth Shostak

I've never understood the cult of Hitchcock. Particularly the late American movies ... Egotism and laziness. And they're all lit like television shows. — Orson Welles

I was dreading all of the ghost stories of working on American television, not in the least, the length. In Britain, a series is six episodes of an hour drama, maybe sometimes eight, but never twenty-two, so I was petrified of that. — Lennie James

The only American soldier convicted in the [My Lai Massacre in Vietnam], Lieutenant William Calley, served three months under house arrest. What the massacre drove home to me was that Oriental life was not terribly valuable. You could extinguish hundreds of Orientals - unarmed villagers, farmers, women, toddlers, infants - and the penalty would be napping and watching television in your apartment for twelve weeks. — Alex Tizon

If TV sitcoms idealized the American suburbs of the 1960s, the works of the artistic elite disparaged them ceaselessly, then and now. The songs of Pete Seeger, novels like Revolutionary Road, the stories of John Cheever, movies like Pleasantville and American Beauty, television series like Mad Men: in all of them, that long-ago land of lawns and houses is depicted as a country of stultifying conformity and cultural emptiness, sexual hypocrisy, alcoholism, and spiritual despair. Privilege murders the senses there, the creatives tell us. Gender roles strangle freedom. Family life turns the heart of adventure to ashes. There's bigotry and gossip and dangerous liaisons behind every closed door. Oh, the soul, the human soul! In the suburbs of fiction, she is forever dying. But — Andrew Klavan