Quotes & Sayings About Reality Television

I find reality television to be so delectable. — Lizzy Caplan

The United States is excellent at breeding psychopaths - a country where we reward the individual with a hyperfocus on success at any cost. We reward narcissism - with our social networks and hideous reality television programs. We — Lisa Unger

My thing in this day and age, with reality television and so much other stuff that is going on, is people want to feel the reality. They want to relate. — Darius McCrary

For how many generations now had his people been turning their backs on things? How long had they sat in their living rooms and watched other people die? — Clare B. Dunkle

Sadism dominates the culture. It runs like an electric current through reality television and trash-talk programs, is at the core of pornography, and fuels the compliant, corporate collective. Corporatism is about crushing the capacity for moral choice and diminishing the individual to force him or her into an ostensibly harmonious collective. This hypermasculinity has its logical fruition in Abu Ghraib, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and our lack of compassion for our homeless, our poor, the mentally ill, the unemployed, and the sick ... We accept the system handed to us and seek to find a comfortable place within it. We retreat into the narrow, confined ghettos created for us and shut our eyes to the deadly superstructure of the corporate state. — Chris Hedges

you see it." Gurdjieff, a great spiritual teacher who taught in Europe and America in the early decades of the twentieth century, noted that if you think you're free and you don't know you are in prison, you can't escape. Gurdjieff saw us as being in a prison of our own habits of mind. Unless we understand how we are conditioned by our desires, we remain stuck in the reality they create, like a television program with an ad that keeps repeating over and over, implanting a subliminal message while we watch the show. BEYOND THOUGHT In the West we get rewarded for rational knowledge and learning. But only when you see that the assumptions you've been working under are not valid, — Ram Dass

I'm used to something where you have to create an entire world, and I do like that process. I like getting the audience to believe that outside of the frame of your television set, there's a whole real world that exists, that is different from your day-to-day reality. — Ronald D. Moore

Because I tend to kind of hide under the sheets when it comes to reality television. I've seen probably one episode of maybe five different shows, and that's about it. — Diane Lane

But reality television is here to stay. — Cilla Black

I discovered television is a great way to deal with the chaos of new motherhood. I would put the babies to bed and get lost in a trashy reality show. — Tamra Davis

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

New Rule: People on reality shows have to quit saying, "You either love me or you hate me." There's actually a third option: not giving a shit about you. — Bill Maher

This whole thing about reality television to me is really indicative of America saying we're not satisfied just watching television, we want to star in our own TV shows. We want you to discover us and put us in your own TV show, and we want television to be about us, finally. — Steven Spielberg

I didn't have parents who were, you know, racing to get a reality television show, you know? Or looking to benefit in some way from their daughter's fame. — Molly Ringwald

I would love to do more movies, but the reality is women have many more opportunities on television to play a greater variety of characters. — Julie Bowen

Reality television hasn't killed documentaries, because there are so many great documentaries still being made, but it certainly has changed the landscape. There is this breed of gimmicky documentary that is basically a reality show. — Todd Phillips

Throughout any given season of 'The Bachelor,' the women exclaim that the experience is like a fairy tale. They suffer the machinations of reality television, pursuing - along with several other women, often inebriated - the promise of happily ever after. — Roxane Gay

As the week's events on reality television demonstrate, there is an ugly underbelly in society only too ready to point the finger at the foreigner, or those who might not fit in. [on celeb big brother — John Sentamu

annoyed her, she also knew her psychiatrist's sentiment was right. She sighed. It was beyond frustrating when things you didn't like were also your reality. "Where do you want the living room furniture?" one of the movers asked. She directed him inside and showed him the dining area off the kitchen that would serve as living and dining. If it weren't for Corrine's forcing her to a table most evenings, Shaye would have eaten every meal curled up on the couch in front of a television, and now — Jana Deleon

What I don't like so much is people who - how do you say this? - who make judgments over the genre of reality like it's television from the devil, and that's something that I don't like because I think everybody should watch what they like. It's a free world. It's a form of democracy. If you like it, watch. If you don't like it, don't watch. — John De Mol Jr.

It's about avoiding reality through various escape routes that become addictions and lead to Hell. My character is addicted to television, chocolate, coffee, to her dream of her son, which has no basis in reality. — Ellen Burstyn

Reality television paints a simple black-and-white world of good characters and bad characters; people we want to root for and people we want to see ruined. There is none of the gray ambiguity that colors real life. I no longer watch a lot of reality television, but sometimes I can't look away from 'Honey Boo Boo.' I just can't. — Molly O'Keefe

What little reality television I've seen seems to be about economic desperation. Like the marathon dancing of the Great Depression, which should give us pause. People willing to eat flies and worms for a sum that is less than the weekly paycheck of the show's producer. I haven't seen "reality television" that is other than this kind of painful, sadistic exploitation of fit young people looking for agents. — Lorrie Moore

As you know, there are several classes of truth. There are the truths that pour out on confessional blogs and YouTube channels. There are the supposed truths exposed in gossip magazines and on reality television, which everyone knows are just lies in truth clothing. Then there are the truths that show themselves only under ideal circumstances: like when you are talking deep into the night with a friend and you tell each other things you would never say if your defenses weren't broken down by salty snacks, sugary beverages, darkness, and a flood of words. There are the truths found in books or films when some writer puts exactly the right words together and it's like their pen turned sword and pierced you right through the heart. Truths like those are rare and getting rarer. — Susan Juby

A disturbing possibility exists that the television experience has not merely blurred the distinctions between the real and the unreal for steady viewers, but that by doing so it has dulled their sensitivities to real events. For when the reality of a situation is diminished, people are able to react to it less emotionally, more as spectators. — Marie Winn

Television is not my favorite medium, my favorite form of entertainment. Certainly game shows aren't. I don't watch reality shows at all. — Chuck Barris

I've sold everything from fashion, make-up, couture magazines, radio, reality television, movies. There isn't a thing I haven't sold, including Tampax. You name it. — Janice Dickinson

Donald Trump has been practicing the chords of reality politics for 11 years doing reality television. And so he's clearly the frontrunner and he is clearly dominating. But I still believe in some old rules. — Hugh Hewitt

I did a little theatre work after that and the following year I got another part in a television series. Then it was almost to the end of the year before I got more work. That was coming to terms with the reality of the vocation I had chosen. — Karl Urban

A lot of stuff, I've noticed, gets manipulated by writers when it's shown on television - even so-called reality television - and makes us think we're supposed to think and act and look certain ways, when the true reality is totally the opposite. Often there's no "right way" to look or think or act, but because we've been so conditioned by the media to think so, we actually mistrust our own better judgment. — Meg Cabot

There's also a possibility that the landlord is in there right now, wearing women's undergarments. Or a drug addict is inside stealing jewelry.Or a boatload of recent Chinese immigrants without a television watching Russia play Finland in hockey and placing bets over beer.
You have no idea what's behind that door. You can't just pick the options within your field of vision. Reality comes from everywhere. At best, you can narrow down the likelihoods. But in the end, it's not a matter of deduction. It's a matter of fact. One bullet will kill you if you're stupid or unlucky. So at least don't be stupid — Derek B. Miller

In every area, we seem to have thrown everything away and embraced reality television. It's nauseating, programme after programme. — Ken Stott

TV in America created the most coherent reality distortion field that I've ever seen. Therein is the problem: People who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically, what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob. — John Perry Barlow

The only shared reality we have is things we have seen on television. — Armando Iannucci

This was the 1940s; there was no television. It was a different age - it was not swamped by media; it was swamped by reality, and storytelling was a very big art where I came from. — Gregory Benford

She's television generation. She learned life from Bugs Bunny. The only reality she knows comes to her through the television set. — William Holden

Reality television is less honest than YouTube. YouTube is the real reality. — Larry Gelbart

Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For — Nathan Hill

Because of reality television and all these celebrities thinking they can be designers, everyone imagines that they can just become a designer, photographer, or model, but that's not the way things work. People have to go to school, learn their craft, and build a brand - that's the right, healthy way to do things. — Anna Wintour

If I had created reality television I would have had a much greater influence, but then I would have had to KILL MYSELF. — Joss Whedon

Well, fame is a drug and when you take it away from an addict, things can get ugly. — Melissa Jo Peltier

You reach a certain age when reality grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shouts in your face:"Hey, look, this is what life is." And you have to open your eyes and look at it, listen to it, smell it: people who don't like you, things you don't want to do, things that hurt, things that scare you, questions without answers, feelings you don't understand, feelings you don't want but have no control over.
Reality.
When you gradually come to realise that all that stuff in books, films, television, magazines, newspapers, comics - it's all rubbish. It's got nothing to do with anything. It's all made up. It doesn't happen like that. It's not real. It means nothing. Reality is what you see when you look out of the window of a bus: dour faces, sad and temporary lives, millions of cars, metal, bricks, glass, rain, cruel laughter, ugliness, dirt, bad teeth, crippled pigeons, little kids in pushchairs who've already forgotten how to smile ... — Kevin Brooks

You have to be rather straightforward with your clients. You can't tell the parties only nice things. This is not an entertainment show; it's not reality television either. — Martti Ahtisaari

We welcome into our homes the machines that vacuum the thoughts out of our heads and pump in someone else's. John Berger in Ways of Seeing said that television advertisers succeeded by persuading viewers to envy themselves as they would be if they bought the product. These programmes do something similar, by persuading the viewer to envy himself as he would be if his life were that little bit more exciting and melodramatic than it actually is. They can make things seem normal that are not. — Peter Hitchens

Get up now and go and find Robert Kilroy-Silk. Smile in a warm, friendly sort of way, then punch him on the nose. Now go and find Robert on television, despite my best endeavours, this is still relatively easy to do. Wait for a close-up, same smile, and punch him on the nose. If you followed the instructions carefully, you will have noticed a distinct difference. On the one hand, you were suffused with a sense of public-spirited righteousness; on the other, you're probably dribbling blood. That's the difference between reality in life and reality on television. — A.A. Gill

There is a belief advanced today, and in some cases by conservative black authors, that poor children and particularly black children should not be allowed to hear too much about these matters. If they learn how much less they are getting than rich children, we are told, this knowledge may induce them to regard themselves as "victims," and such "victim-thinking," it is argued, may then undermine their capacity to profit from whatever opportunities may actually exist. But this is a matter of psychology-or strategy-and not reality. The matter, in any case, is academic since most adolescents in the poorest neighborhoods learn very soon that they are getting less than children in the wealthier school districts. They see suburban schools on television and they see them when they travel for athletic competitions. It is a waste of time to worry whether we should tell them something they could tell to us. About injustice, most poor children in American cannot be fooled. — Jonathan Kozol

Most of the information we now get is through television and is mutilated. Photography offers the opportunity to spend much more time on a topic. It's relatively cheaper medium, and can allow a photographer really to live in another place, show another reality, get closer to the truth. — Sebastiao Salgado

If people are well paid for reality television and cotton candy and dunking a basketball, why can't they be well paid for changing young minds? — B.J. Novak

After dinner the babies get fussy and Min puts a mush of ice cream and Hershey's syrup in their bottles and we watch The Worst That Could Happen, a half-hour of computer simulations of tragedies that have never actually occurred but theoretically could. A kid gets hit by a train and flies into a zoo, where he's eaten by wolves. A man cuts his hand off chopping wood and while wandering around screaming for help is picked up by a tornado and dropped on a preschool during recess and lands on a pregnant teacher. ("Sea Oak") — George Saunders

What you don't see on television is people dying today because they can't get to a doctor and they can't afford prescription drugs. That's why they are also dying. They are dying in Iraq because they are poor and they have gone into the military because they can't afford to go to college. They're dying because they're living in communities where asthma rates are extremely high because the air is filthy. The suffering of the poor and working class people is a virtual nonissue for the media. But that is the reality. — Bernie Sanders

I have lots of favorite shows, but not reality! I don't like reality TV so much. I'm saddened by people who don't show respect to each other and to themselves. It's horrible. Unfortunately, that's demonstrated a lot on reality television. — Barbara Mandrell

Reality television is a scripted hyper-life that employs writers, but won't allow them to call themselves writers or join the union. — Merrill Markoe

The Street is as large as consciousness itself. So, when creating art for the street, be mindful of where the public's head is at these days. Give the public a real alternative to the strict diet of celebrity gossip, religion, and un-reality television. — Eric Drooker

I'm probably the biggest reality television star living. — Janice Dickinson

When reality television really hit, I just had a backlash towards reality. It seemed like a cheap way to make a product. And then when music reality and 'Idol hit,' I just didn't watch it, it seemed novelty. And of course the story of 'Idol,' this is one of the greatest stories in television history. — Carson Daly

Would this make sense to the TV audience? That a thing like a protest expands and draws everything into it. He wants to tell his audience that the reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it's his job to prevent this closure. — Nathan Hill

The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television. — Thomas Merton

Television glorifies war, ... And the reality is we have some remarkably brave men and women who work through such challenging circumstances to make us as safe as we are. — Dave Price

We have been expropriated from our own language by television, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by mass pornography, from our city by the police and from our friends by wage-labor. — The Invisible Committee

I had to start watching [The Real Housewives of New Jersey] every week because, well, my IQ was just too high. I mean seriously up there. What can I tell you? After watching every episode, I am now officially as dumb as that brown, particle-like stuff you find outside and don't want to track inside the house. Rhymes with "wirt", I think. — Celia Rivenbark

It's about the power of design and the power of the human spirit. It's above paying anybody to do something stupid for money like reality television does - like ambushing people. — Genevieve Gorder

If you're just snoozing every day until the last possible moment you have to head off to work, show up for school, or take care of your family, and then coming home and zoning out in front of the television until you go to bed (this used to be my daily routine), I've got to ask you: When are you going to develop yourself into the person you need to be to create the levels of health, wealth, happiness, success, and freedom that you truly want and deserve? When are you going to actually live your life instead of numbly going through the motions looking for every possible distraction to escape reality? What if your reality - your life - could finally be something that you can't wait to be conscious for? — Hal Elrod

Despite the variety and the differences, and however much we proclaim the contrary, what the media produce is neither spontaneous nor completely "free:" "news" does not just happen, pictures and ideas do not merely spring from reality into our eyes and minds, truth is not directly available, we do not have unrestrained variety at our disposal.
For like all modes of communication, television, radio, and newspapers observe certain rules and conventions to get things across intelligibly, and it is these, often more than the reality being conveyed, that shape the material delivered by the media. — Edward W. Said

television's sole function these days is to drive permanent wedges between people with different philosophies in such a way that an insatiable furor keeps us coming back to confirm our biases and condemn our opponents. Reasonable discourse doesn't sell commercial time. Intellectual inflammation rules the airwaves. That and reality shows about repugnant housewives yearning to be famous. — Doug Philips

I think reality television is such a special talent. — Margaret Cho

Television is kind of a disappointment. I often want to watch it, but I find it quite hard - I don't like soaps, reality TV or celebrity chefs. — Quentin Blake

Speculators are obsessed with predicting: guessing the direction of stock prices. Every morning on cable television, every afternoon on the stock market report, every weekend in Barron's, every week in dozens of market newsletters, and whenever business people get together. In reality, no one knows what the market will do; trying to predict it is a waste of time, and investing based upon that prediction is a purely speculative undertaking. — Seth Klarman

Real love involves a foundation of respect, honesty, and trust, concepts wholly missing from the pale imitations hawked to us by the folks who script 'unscripted' entertainment. — Jennifer L. Pozner

Thomas Merton to write: The modern child may early in his or her existence have natural inclinations toward spirituality. The child may have imagination, originality, a simple and individual response to reality, and even a tendency to moments of thoughtful silence and absorption. All these tendencies, however, are soon destroyed by the dominant culture. The child becomes a yelling, brash, false little monster, brandishing a toy gun or dressed up like some character he has seen on television. His head is filled with inane slogans, songs, noises, explosions, statistics, brand names, menaces, ribaldries, and cliches. Then, when the child gets to school, he learns to verbalize, rationalize, to pace, to make faces like an advertisement, to need a car and in short, to go through life with an empty head conforming to others, like himself, in togetherness.3 — Brennan Manning

I don't enjoy reality television at all. I have to say that I get it, though. I watch some of it, and I understand why people enjoy it. — Kristen Schaal

Television remains an incredible tool when it comes to ensure the best promo, but one thing was always clear to me, I didn't want reality stars; I wanted stars. — Kelly Rowland

It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict, it is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts. — Shirley Chisholm

Reality TV is set up to make people entertaining. A good person with values and principles is not good television. — Ronda Rousey

Hollywood's Studio Era was part of a Golden Age because it didn't need profanity (unlike reality-television today) — Manny Pacheco

Reality Television is the 'Howard Stern-ation' of all that is bad with our media today — Manny Pacheco

Sometimes I look around my living room, and the most real thing in the room is the television. It's bright and vivid, and the rest of my life looks drab. So I turn the damn thing off. That does it every time. Get my life back. — Michael Crichton

The Denarians want to disrupt civilization, and with the Archive under their control, they could do it. Maybe they'd use biological or chemical weapons instead. Maybe they'd crash the world economy. Maybe they'd turn every program on television into one of those reality shows." "That's mostly done already, Harry. — Jim Butcher

I'm quite proud of what I anticipated about reality television from my books in the early '90s, which I based on the early seasons of 'Cops' and on the amazing stuff I had read about happening on Japanese shows and the British 'Big Brother'. — William Gibson

Usually, if I'm yelling at the TV, I'm in a bar. If I'm by myself, and it's not a game, I often find myself scolding reality stars that can't hear me through the television set. — Ben Feldman

Television and movies have short-circuited reality. I don't think a lot of people are entirely clear on what is real and what is on the screen. — Alan Moore

So you're a fellow mercenary, then."
"Does this mean you'll afford me some professional courtesy?"
"Don't ask for that. All it means is that you might get to face the person who kills you ... But only if it's convenient. — Howard Tayler

Most Americans living below the official poverty line own a car or truck - and government entitlement programs seldom provide cars and trucks. Most people living below the official poverty line also have air condition, color television and a microwave oven - and these too are not usually handed out by government entitlement programs. Cell phone and other electronic devices are by no means unheard of in low-income neighborhoods, where children would supposedly go hungry if there were no school lunch programs. In reality, low-income people are overweight even more often than other Americans. — Thomas Sowell

I think people today are very cynical. They need to bring other people down. Reality television and tabloid magazines-never before did we need to see movie stars taking out their garbage. But all of a sudden, it's front-page news-trying to figure out who's dating whom, all that stuff. Who cares? — Scarlett Johansson

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

YouTube is, like, the new reality television. — Connor Franta

It's not an accident that both my sister and I are writers. Our parents created an accidental Petri dish. My family has great storytellers, and I grew up in a very funny, conversational house and didn't have television. This small family farm was a bubble world that didn't have much to do with reality. — Elizabeth Gilbert

Whenever the subject of doing reality television comes up, I immediately disregard it, because most people don't come off well, and it's embarrassing. — Amanda Hearst

Matt Merton comes back and explains that last week's show on suicide, in which the parents watched a reenactment of their son's suicide, was a healing process for the parents, then shows a video of the parents admitting it was a healing process. ("Sea Oak") — George Saunders

I think the love-hate is fundamental. Everyone hates reality television, and everyone's watching it. Everyone hates Facebook, and everyone is on it. — Bo Burnham

The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark voyeurism into other people's humiliation, pain, weakness, and betrayal. — Chris Hedges

No matter what you may think about her politics or her record, Hillary Clinton understands that this is not reality television; this is reality. She understands the job of president. It involves finding solutions, not pointing fingers; and offering hope, not stoking fear. — Michael Bloomberg

People who think achieving success is a linear A-to-Z process, a straight shot to the top, simply aren't in touch with reality. There are very few bona fide overnight success stories. It just doesn't work that way. Success appears to happen overnight because we all see stories in newspapers and on TV about previously unknown people who have suddenly become famous. But consider a sequoia tree that has been growing for several hundred years. Just because a television crew one day decides to do a story about that tree
doesn't mean it didn't exist before. — Donald Trump

We are told by media - books, television, reality shows - that heartbreak is this terrible thing and yet we should seek it. We're told that heartbreak is all about love and we should just go after that high over and over again. We are told it is healthy to be addicted to this kind of behavior and the highs associated with love. But, that's not all what heartbreak is. — Sandra Cisneros

I don't think movies or television have any basis in reality at all. It's all just pretend. That's what's fun about it. — James Spader

What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning, and how, in conjunction with television, it undermines the old idea of school. Who cares how many boxes of cereal can be sold via television? We need to know if television changes our conception of reality, the relationship of the rich to the poor, the idea of happiness itself. A preacher who confines himself to considering how a medium can increase his audience will miss the significant question: In what sense do new media alter what is meant by religion, by church, even by God? And if the politician cannot think beyond the next election, then we must wonder about what new media do to the idea of political organization and to the conception of citizenship. — Neil Postman

Some people prefer to see the game in the television than to go to the stadium. With virtual reality this will go to be worse, but at the end the "real" reality will win, because a virtual meal is not the same thing as a real one! — Rodolfo Llinas

Women on television are not a fad; we are not a trend - we are a reality! — Betsy Beers

Some of the greatest reality television we ever had was the moon landings. When you think about it, that was human emotion and people, unscripted, working with each other - and millions and millions of people around the world, glued to their television sets to share real-time in a brand new, fascinating human experience. — Chris Hadfield

Upon reflection, it is relatively easy to understand how Americans come to deny the evils of mass incarceration. Denial is facilitated by persistent racial segregation in housing and schools, by political demagoguery, by racialized media imagery, and by the ease of changing one's perception of reality simply by changing television channels. There is little reason to doubt the prevailing "common sense" that black and brown men have been locked up en masse merely in response to crime rates when one's sources of information are mainstream media outlets. — Michelle Alexander

Bullish or bearish are terms used by people who do not engage in practicing uncertainty, like the television commentators, or those who have no experience in handling risk. Alas, investors and businesses are not paid in probabilities; they are paid in dollars. Accordingly, it is not how likely an event is to happen that matters, it is how much is made when it happens that should be the consideration. — Nassim Nicholas Taleb