Popular Television Quotes & Sayings

A handful of individual football stars - not necessarily the most talented, but those boasting good looks, beautiful wives and an animated private life - assumed a role in European public life and popular newspapers hitherto reserved for movie starlets or minor royalty. When David Beckham (an English player of moderate technical gifts but an unsurpassed talent for self-promotion) moved from Manchester United to Real Madrid in 2003, it made headline television news in every member-state of the European Union. Beckham's embarrassing performance at the European Football Championships in Portugal the following year - the England captain missed two penalties, hastening his country's ignominious early departure - did little to dampen the enthusiasm of his fans. — Tony Judt

Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago. — Steven Johnson

NBA games are exciting to watch and have global appeal. They are very popular in China. I do watch NBA games on television when I have time. — Xi Jinping

Like most citizens of popular and international urban centres, I don't take advantage of the cultural opportunities. Perhaps this comes from growing up in suburbia. Home is where you eat, sleep, read, watch television and ignore your parents. It is not where you go to the ballet and then attend a heated panel discussion about it afterwards. — Sloane Crosley

I've no patience for people who say they never watch television. It's a great way to keep in touch with popular culture, and it's important that children can relate to what their schoolmates are watching. — Terry Wogan

I don't go to movies, I don't own a television, I don't buy magazines and I try not to receive mail, so I'm not really aware of popular culture. — Jesse Eisenberg

When television captured the popular imagination of the 1950s, a rash of movies satirized Hollywood while also mythologizing it. — Steve Erickson

I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it. — Robert Crumb

We live in a world ruled by fictions of every kind - mass-merchandising, advertising, politics conducted as a branch of advertising, the instant translation of science and technology into popular imagery, the increasing blurring and intermingling of identities within the realm of consumer goods, the pre-empting of any free or original imaginative response to experience by the television screen. — J.G. Ballard

During the 1970s and 1980s, the popular television soap opera As The World Turns portrayed sunrise during the opening credits and sunset during the closing credits ... The soap-opera sunrise showed the sun moving toward the left as it rose rather than to the right. They obviously had gotten a piece of film showing a sunset and played it in reverse ... Had they called their local astrophysicists, any one of us might have recommended that if they needed to save money, they could have shown the sunset in a mirror before they showed it running backward. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

If you're too young to remember the Time Before Pong, then you probably can't appreciate the momentousness of its arrival. Bear in mind the game emerged in a very different world. It was a time before home computers, cable television, cell phones, game consoles, the Internet--everything we take for granted today. For many of my formative years, we still watched TV in black and white, and had to get up to change the channel. This was the technological Dark Ages. Had we been less culturally enlightened, we would have denounced Pong as witchcraft and burned its inventors at the stake. For those of us who were there--who had never played, let alone seen, a video game--we knew we were witnessing something extraordinary, a groundbreaking achievement in home entertainment. However, none of us knew that we were participating in the birth of a revolution. — Devin C. Griffiths

In some churches today and on some religious television programs, we see the attempt to make Christianity popular and pleasant. We have taken the cross away and substituted cushions. — Billy Graham

I nowadays have the feeling that not only are most bookmen are eccentrics, but even the act they support
reading
is itself an eccentricity now, if a mild one. Interrupted narrative has become a natural thing. One could argue that Dickens and the other popular, serially published nineteenth-century novelists started this, and the television commercial made interruption come to seem normal. But the silicon chip has accelerated the process of interruption beyond all reckoning: iPods, Blackberries, laptops all break narrative into shorter and shorter sequences. — Larry McMurtry

Parents ... rigidly monitor the selection of television programs ... and other forms of entertainment for your family. Foster in your homes a love of knowledge through uplifting literature; wholesome books; selective movies; classical and exemplary popular music; entertainment that uplifts and edifies the spirit and mind. — David B. Haight

One of the more problematic aspects of the current state of cinema in Japan is that the movies playing in the theaters are by and large made not by film studios but by broadcasting companies. They're either extensions of popular television dramas or adaptations of manga or anime. Younger Japanese are simply not being exposed to good films. That situation needs to change. — Hirokazu Koreeda

o prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. — Neil Postman

Amanda Werner and several other beautiful, elegant, conically breasted foreign ladies, from unspecified vaguely defined countries, plus a few bucolic co-called humorists, comprised Buster's perpetual core of repeats. Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster's unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week. — Philip K. Dick

If you look at the curricula of most universities and schools in this country [USA], considering our long encounter with the Islamic world, there is very little there that you can get hold of that is really informative about Islam. If you look at the popular media, you'll see that the stereotype that begins with Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik has really remained and developed into the transnational villain of television and film and culture in general. — Edward Said

A television chat show is light entertainment, so it is trivial by its very nature. It is hardly the place to get people to reveal their innermost thoughts. Then it becomes sensationalism, and you lower yourself to the level of the popular newspapers. — Terry Wogan

The romance of circumvention is one of the most destructive forces at work in our society. The American Idol freeway to greatness, Instagramming one's way into popular consciousness with selfies of our ass folds beneath short shorts, human growth hormone and performance-enhancing drugs for athletes, Adderall for the idle mind, reality television that sacrifices our dignity for fifteen lousy minutes ... — Daniel Gillies

If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable. — Edward R. Murrow

In some churches and religious television programs, we see an effort to make Christianity popular and always positive. This may be a comfortable cushion for those who find the hard facts too difficult. — Billy Graham

It's nice to go and be a guest on a television sitcom. It pays well; it's easy because generally it's a supporting role, so you go, you do two or three things, you're in touch with people there. They're widely popular, so they're seen by many people. — Isabella Rossellini

I am an unconventional beauty. I grew up in a high school where if you didn't have a nose job and money and if you weren't thin, you weren't cool, popular, beautiful. I was always told that I wasn't pretty enough to be on television. — Lea Michele

Even though universal metanarratives are largely absent, personal "I" narratives are everywhere. The popular imagination is saturated with self-obsessive stories in film, television, advertising, music, MySpace, and YouTube - but this is the equivalent of bingeing on junk food while dying for want of substance. — Sarah Arthur

I think that people are going to find more interest in the human condition, especially with them being weaned on so much reality television. They want character driven stuff along with real violence. Cage fighting is very popular with the kids right now. They see and know what one punch can do to someone's face. You can't give someone five hundred punches in a film anymore. — Dolph Lundgren

Television is much more difficult because at every moment the network can force you to change things based on their belief about what would make it popular. You're in a constant debate with a gun at your head, and the gun is cancellation. So it's hard to win the arguments. — Judd Apatow

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

Some of our newspapers and magazines are more concerned with the welfare of their advertisers than they are with the dissemination of news and the discussion of matters of lasting importance ... Radio, television, motion pictures, popular books - all contribute ... to ... the stifling of dissent on all but the most banal levels ... a renunciation of the most basic and precious of democratic principles. — J. Paul Getty

The battle against good and evil is raging now! Look at your television programming and movie advertisements presenting the occult ... the demonic ... the satanic ... the practice of witchcraft and sorcery in popular books ... the open hostility toward Christianity and the revival of anti-Semitism. The fight is on for the hearts and minds of our children in ours homes, our schools, our universities, and our society. — John Hagee

I don't want my president to be a TV star. You don't have to be on television every minute of every day - you're the president, not a rerun of 'Law & Order'. TV stars are too worried bout being popular and too concerned about being renewed. — Bill Maher

I think it's sad that movies and television have caused the theatre to fade as a popular art form. I hope to get young people into the theatre and expose them to Shakespeare. — Kelly McGillis

It is among the ranks of school-age children, those six- to twelve-year-olds who once avidly filled their free moments with childhood play, that the greatest change is evident. In the place of traditional, sometimes ancient childhood games that were still popular a generation ago, in the place of fantasy and make- believe play ... today's children have substituted television viewing and, most recently, video games. — Marie Winn

Unfortunately, we are living in an era where plenty of songs with vulgar, objectionable lyrics are also becoming popular. It's a disturbing trend, and I feel really sad when I see small kids dancing to such numbers in television shows. In my career so far, I have refused any song whose lyrics I haven't been comfortable with. — Shreya Ghoshal

Downton Abbey is the most popular drama in the history of public television. When the whole of the TV universe is fragmenting, that isn't just impressive. It's almost impossible. But here we are. — David Bianculli

Frank Halford was a master at the school and remembers Adams as "very tall even then, and popular. He wrote an end-of-term play when Doctor Who had just started on television. He called it 'Doctor Which.' " Many years later, Adams did write scripts for Doctor Who. He describes Halford as an inspirational teacher who is still a support. "He once gave me ten out of ten for a story, which was the only time he did throughout his long school career. And even now, when I have a dark night of the soul as a writer and think that I can't do this anymore, the thing that I reach for is not the fact that I have had best-sellers or huge advances. It is the fact that Frank Halford once gave me ten out of ten, and at some fundamental level I must be able to do it. — Douglas Adams

[A] new finding shows that while in the 1940s, three-quarters of those surveyed claimed to dream in black and white, today, three-quarters say the opposite, that they dream in color. This reversal is attributed to a change in the number of people who grew up watching color rather than black and white television ... another hint that our private dreams are intimately linked to our collective mediated experiences. — Katherine A. Fowkes

You think that drinking with a serial killer takes you into the midnight currents of the culture? I say bullshit. There's been twelve TV documentaries, three movies and eight books about me. I'm more popular than any of these designed-by-pedophile pop moppets littering the music television and the gossip columns. I've killed more people than Paris Hilton has desemenated, I was famous before she was here and I'll be famous after she's gone. I am the mainstream. I am, in fact, the only true rock star of the modern age. Every newspaper in America never fails to report on my comeback tours, and I get excellent reviews. — Warren Ellis

To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is psychotherapy; to political ideology, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Freud called it. The riddle may be postponed through longer life, and then perhaps solved altogether by cryogenics. — Neil Postman

When I turned about 14, I developed a friendship with this guy whose mom was the secretary to Ernest Angley, the faith healer, who's very popular in the Midwest. He had a television show, and he was sort of like Liberace mixed with Jerry Falwell - very glitzy, very high-tech. — Marilyn Manson

Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures. — Alan Hirsch

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

By ... our readiness to allow arms to be purchased at will and fired at whim; by allowing our movie and television screens to teach our children that the hero is one who masters the art of shooting and the technique of killing ... we have created an atmosphere in which violence and hatred have become popular pastimes. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Explicit material is available in a variety of forums - from popular music to television to the Internet. — Tipper Gore

I could never have imagined that firing 67 people on national television would actually make me more popular, especially with the younger generation. — Donald Trump

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

Television is making sports universal; for the same reason, big-time soccer is growing more popular in the United States. — George Vecsey

The program is only the excuse to get you to watch the advertising. Without the ads there would be no programs. Advertising is the true content of television and if it does not remain so, then advertisers will cease to support the medium, and television will cease to exist as the popular entertainment it presently is. — Jerry Mander