Quotes & Sayings About Pbs

I watched Ken Burns' Civil War series on PBS. My favorite segment is when Bob Hope entertains the troops at Gettysburg. — Mort Sahl

My dream is someday to have a bank of TVs, where all the different channels could be on and I could be monitoring them. I would love that. The more the better. I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it's TV ... Because that's TV's mode. That's the Age of Hollywood. The idea of PBS - heavy-duty Masterpiece Theater, Bill Moyers - I hate all that. — Camille Paglia

If you're going to die, die interesting! Is there anything worse than a boring death? (Other than a Charlie Rose marathon on PBS?) I think not. When my time comes I'm going to go out in high style. I have no intention of being sick or lingering or dragging on and on and boring everyone I know. — Joan Rivers

So now it's space and time," he said. "You ever watch Doctor Who on PBS?"
"All the time," she said dryly, "on the BBC. And don't think I wouldn't sell my soul for a TARDIS. — Diana Gabaldon

Today it has been estimated that the average 70 year old has four chronic conditions and consumes an average of 35 PBS scripts per year for those conditions. — Julie Bishop

Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical - and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers. — Charles Krauthammer

If you had to pay separately for just PBS, probably, sadly, not a majority of Americans would do that. So there's many channels, whether it's Discovery Channel or C-SPAN or many, many others, that just aren't viable. — Brian L. Roberts

When I graduated from Brown after majoring in women's studies, I made my first PBS documentary, 'Women of Substance.' My first feature documentary was called 'American Hollow,' which I did for HBO and was at the Sundance Film Festival. — Rory Kennedy

Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness. — Steve Martin

The earliest stand-up comedy I was aware of was Bill Cosby. I watched Saturday Night Live as soon as I was aware of it, and Monty Python used to be on PBS at weird hours, so I used to try to watch that. And I loved George Carlin on SNL, that was the first stand-up I ever really remember seeing on TV. And then Steve Martin. I guess I was in fifth or sixth grade when Steve Martin showed up, and he was instantly my idol. And Richard Pryor around the same time too, I sort of became aware of him, though I don't remember the first time I saw him. — Louis C.K.

I love seeing other channels counterprogram the Super Bowl. PBS: DAMN RIGHT we're airing a new 'Masterpiece Classic'! Fuck off, sports! — Tara Ariano

Barbies were banned at our house, along with television other than PBS. As a kid, I found this horribly embarrassing. — Leila Janah

I grew up watching PBS and wanting to be a part of it, just like HBO. — Jeremy Piven

I got a PBS mind in a reality TV world. — Zetta Brown

Dad and I had only talked about boys once before when he said something about birds and bees and then he told me it was just natural and I asked what was just natural and he said s-e-x and I'd freaked out, run to my room, slammed the door, and watched PBS for three hours just so I could feel wholesome again. — Megan Jean Sovern

Cutting PBS support (0.012% of budget) to help balance the Federal budget is like deleting text files to make room on your 500Gig hard drive — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

I like the dynamic of PBS. They're very honest and authentic. — Eric Ripert

Watching 'Doctor Who' in the United States meant I was always behind the times - PBS didn't get new episodes until two years after they ran, and I was aware of the show's cancellation before the characters themselves knew, at least in my corner of the world. — Seanan McGuire

I love PBS! I grew up on it. If I had to say which channels were good, I'd say, you got your PBS, your History Channel, your Discovery. — Nas

Monty Python only became valuable when it was sold to Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) in America. They didn't pay much either, but the series has been shown repeatedly, which led to lucrative tapes, CDs and DVDs. — Eric Idle

I got a PBS mind in an MTV world. — Jimmy Buffett

A FASCINATING PBS SPECIAL on black holes: the suck and draw so strong it can gulp down light. — Lauren Groff

Trying to assassinate the president should not be funny. It really shouldn't. It's not like I was cracking up when we read about Lincoln or JFK. But let's face it, they were real presidents. Gerald Ford ranks right up there with Millard Fillmore and Bush the First on the list of unexciting white men who have run this country, made their way into history books, and otherwise been human sleeping pills. If all the presidents had been television shows, Gerald Ford would probably have been a PBS fund drive. So I'd bet the fact that anyone would try to kill Gerald Ford, Gerald Rudolph Ford, was kind of hard to get excited about, even back in the day. — Alison Umminger

My dad keeps joking about sneaking into my grandparents' house and switching out their HBO for PBS so they think I'm on 'Downton Abbey.' — Allison Williams

I'd like my grandkids to be able to watch PBS. But I'm not willing to borrow money from China, and make my kids have to pay the interest on that, and my grandkids, over generations, as opposed to saying to PBS, 'Look, you're going to have to raise more money from charitable contributions or from advertising.' — Mitt Romney

We believed - and I personally still believe - that the so called Voice of God narration, ubiquitous in documentaries destined for PBS, is insulting to the audience. If you believe in the intelligence of your audience, you don't need to tell them what to think and how to process the material they're seeing. — Jayne Loader

One night I begged Robin, a scientist by training, to watch Arthur Miller's 'Death of a Salesman' with me on PBS. He lasted about one act, then turned to me in horror: 'This is how you spend your days? Thinking about things like this?' I was ashamed. I could have been learning about string theory or how flowers pollinate themselves.
I think his remark was the beginning of my crisis of faith. Like so many of my generation in graduate school, I had turned to literature as a kind of substitute for formal religion, which no longer fed my soul, or for therapy, which I could not afford ... I became interested in exploring the theory of nonfiction and in writing memoir, a genre that gives us access to that lost Middlemarch of reflection and social commentary. — Mary Rose O'Reilley

But there were alternative media outlets. Oh sure, and you know who listens to them? Pansy, overeducated know-it-alls, and you know who listens to them? Nobody! Who's going to care about some PBS-NPR fringe minority that's out of touch with the mainstream? The more those elitist eggheads shouted "The Dead Are Walking," the more most real Americans tuned them out. — Max Brooks

In this country tonight, PBS shows one of the most talked about tributes of the year. — Steve Inskeep

Jeff Smith was the Julia Child of my generation. When his television show, 'The Frugal Gourmet,' made its debut on PBS in the 1980s, it conveyed such genuine enthusiasm for cooking that I was moved for the first time to slap down cold cash for a collection of recipes. — Alton Brown

Perhaps it is to fulfill this primal urge that runners and joggers get up every morning and pound the streets in cities all over the world. To feel the stirring of something primeval deep down in the pits of our bellies. To feel "a little bit wild." Running is not exactly fun. Running hurts. It takes effort. Ask any runner why he runs, and he will probably look at you with a wry smile and say, "I don't know." But something keeps us going. We may obsess about our PBs and mileage count, but these things alone are not enough to get us out running... What really drives us is something else, this need to feel human, to reach below the multitude of layers of roles and responsibilites that societ y has placed on us, down below the company name tags, and even the father, husband, and son, labels, to the pure, raw human being underneath. At such moments, our rational mind becomes redundant. We move from thought to feeling. — Adharanand Finn

I started as a child, in this PBS series 'Voyage of the Mimi,' which led to driving down to New York for 'Afterschool Special' auditions, which led to moving to Los Angeles. I wanted to be an actor. But in L.A., I got into film technology, and I was building cheap editing systems and would edit my friend's acting reels. — Ben Affleck

When I start to think about all the things, I'm doing sometimes I just have to thank the man upstairs. Because I'm doing the morning show here in Chicago 5 days a week, and I have the syndicated radio show that's been going on now for several years. In addition we are in the midst of taping 13 episodes of a television show-The Legends of Jazz: The Masters of jazz on PBS-TV. — Ramsey Lewis

I'm a walking advertisement for PBS and for the Discovery Channel. All of my DVR settings are pretty much set to record anything that's on the Discovery Channel. I'm a big fan of 'MythBusters' and 'Deadliest Catch,' and I'm constantly watching 'Moyers & Company' and the 'NewsHour' and 'Antiques Roadshow.' — Thomas Sadoski

Give me back the $800 billion for the Iraq war and children's television PBS is on the house. — Jon Stewart

Immigration is not an issue that I read about in the newspaper or watch a documentary on PBS or CNN. It's an issues I've lived around my whole life. My family are immigrants. My wife's family are immigrants. All of my neighbors are immigrants. — Marco Rubio

The grin got bigger. Shadow found himself remembering a PBS show he had seen as a teenager, about chimpanzees. The show claimed that when apes and chimps smile it's only to bare their teeth in a grimace of hate or aggression or terror. When a chimp grins, it's a threat. This grin was one of those. — Neil Gaiman

Having fun isn't hard when you've got a library card.
[Arthur] — PBS Kids

Don't count out other amazing programming like Frontline. You will still find more hours of in-depth news programming, investigative journalism and analysis on PBS than on any other outlet. — Gwen Ifill

I taped my first series for PBS in 1982 at WJCT-TV in Jacksonville, Florida. The show, called 'Everyday Cooking with Jacques Pepin,' was about saving time and money in the kitchen - and it was a celebration of simple and unpretentious food. — Jacques Pepin

Norbu rejects the Western stereotype of Tibetans as an innately nonviolent people, a romantic notion which he thinks gratifies many Western people discontented with the aggressive selfishness of their societies but obscures the political aspirations of the Tibetan peoples and the variety of means available to them to achieve independence. In 1989, he published a book about one of the Khampa warriors of eastern Tibet, who fought the invading Chinese Army in 1950 and then initiated the bloody revolt against Chinese rule that eventually led to the Dalai Lama's departure for India.
"We are ordinary Tibetans," Norbu told PBS. "We drink; we eat; we feel passion; we love our wives and kids. If someone sort of messes around with them, even if they're an army, you pick up your rifle. — Pankaj Mishra

One of the questions that I hear over and over and over is, 'What do we do with all these paintings we do on television?' Most of these paintings are donated to PBS stations across the country. They auction them off, and they make a happy buck with 'em. — Bob Ross

A generation ago, or two, when there were three channels, plus PBS, and when you needed - when you needed 15 million people to make a living, the media could focus on the broad country. And most people had no choice about getting political information. It was there at 6:30 whether you wanted it or not. — David Frum

I watch television all the time, mostly PBS and old movies like 'The Quiet Man,' my favorite Wayne movie. It's marvelous. I just loved the man and still do. — James Arness

We had maybe the greatest success of any company that I know of in Paris, and after two or three years I wanted to do this same number that we did for PBS, so we did it and Paris had always considered us their darlings. — Katherine Dunham

We all have to draw some lines. To preserve my sanity, I steer clear of cooking, professional sports and most imports, unless imported to us via PBS, Sundance, etc. — Hank Stuever

The insecticides kill the black flies, but also destroy much of the food chain for the bird, fish, and animal life which also inhabit those regions. The fish of the Great Lakes are laced with mercury from industrial plants, and fluoride from aluminum plants poisons the land and the people. Sewage from the population centers is mixed with PCBs and PBS in the watershed of the great lakes and the Finger Lakes, and the water is virtually nowhere safe for any living creatures. — Winona LaDuke

I just am a huge fan of PBS. They've taken great risks from great shows. — Kim Raver

It doesn't matter if I go on CBS, PBS or Fox. Whoever is interviewing me is going to want to create some conflict in the story, or it's not interesting. That's just the way the news is. — Mark McKinnon

Would PBS go so far as to give air time to an even more extreme kind of disinformer, a Holocaust denier? — Joseph J. Romm

You have to stay focused because a lot of things will break your confidence. But if you stay focused and want it bad enough you can achieve. I know that sounds like a PBS special, but it's true, straight up. — Chamillionaire

Kill your television. Throw it out the darn window. Watch PBS in a bar. — Chris Thile

I'm sorry I'm not more cultured. I'll watch PBS. And cut people open for fun. Will that be better? Will you be less embarrassed to be my fledgling then? — Jennifer Armintrout

I listened to Karen Woo give an explaination of photosynthesis once," he said. "God only knows why they were discussing photosynthesis.They hung on her every word, like she was a PBS special. Her explaination didn't even involve sunlight. These people will believe anything. They will say anything. — Joshua Ferris

People see you on television, and they think you make the same amount of money that Clint Eastwood does. But this is PBS. All these shows are done for free. — Bob Ross

Consumers can choose from hundreds of channels today, including dozens for kids. At a time of dwindling resources, we don't need to be subsidizing PBS. It's time for Big Bird the mooch to compete with 'Dora the Explorer' and 'Bob the Builder.' — Mark McKinnon

This is the first time in my 32 years in public broadcasting that PBS has ordered up programs for ideological instead of journalistic reasons. — Bill Moyers

I watched a lot of cooking shows when I was younger on PBS and TLC and those channels. It's a very cool genre of television. — Thu Tran

I want to be Jacques Pepin. I want to have a nice 50-, 60-year career. I want to be on PBS when I'm 70-something, still kicking it, having a great time, showing up in Aspen to sign cookbooks. I just want to have a nice, big, long career. — Tyler Florence

When Ben arrived, he was having a bad hair day. He looked like Francine from those Arthur cartoons on PBS, and yet I was still very attracted to him. — Courtney Robertson

All paradises, all utopias are designed by who is not there, by the people who are not allowed in.
[Conversation with Elizabeth Farnsworth, PBS NewsHour, March 9, 1998] — Toni Morrison

Those worship songs on the Christmas project will air on PBS television. That's highly unusual. — John Tesh

I like PBS. I love Big Bird ... But I'm not going to keep on spending money on things to borrow money from China to pay for. — Mitt Romney

Typically, only about 2 percent of the American populace tunes in to PBS's 'Nova' series - the most successful science show on the tube. 'Survivor' and 'X Factor' get twice the ratings. — Seth Shostak

On the PBS recording of 'The Light in the Piazza' backstage, you get to see me doing some sweet lunges down the hallway of the Vivian Beaumont. — Aaron Lazar