Quotes & Sayings About Television Sets

This is a life, he thought, smooth skipping stones bounding across the surfaces of time, with brief moments of deepened consciousness as you hit the water before going airborne again, flying across the carpool lane, over weeks at a desk, enjoying yourself when the skipping stopped, and spending the rest of your life in a kind of drifting contentment, slipped consciousness, lost weekends, the glow from the television sets warming placid faces, smile lines growing in the glare of the screen. — Jess Walter

I grew up in the world of bad television, on my dad's sets and then as a young schmuck on dating shows and so on. — George Clooney

There were some television sets back in the '50s, but they were expensive. People would gather at the rich guy's apartment down the hall to watch Milton Berle on his 10-inch black-and-white screen. — Al Feldstein

Where men had once howled and hacked at one another, and fought nip-and-tuck with nature as well, the machines hummed and whirred and clicked, and made parts for baby carriages and bottle caps, motorcycles and refrigerators, television sets and tricycles-the fruits of peace. — Kurt Vonnegut

They were delivered to mansions remodeled into country clubs, boarding schools, retreats for the insane, alcohol cures, health farms, wildlife sanctuaries, wallpaper factories, drafting rooms and places where the aged and the infirm waited sniffily for the angel of death in front of their television sets. — John Cheever

A mature society is one that reserves its moral outrage for what really matters: poverty and preventable diseases in the third world, arms sales, oppression, injustice. Bad language and sex might offend some, who certainly have a right to complain; but they do not have a right to censor. They do not have to watch or listen if they are offended: they have an 'off' button on their television sets and radios. After all, it is morally outrageous that moral outrage should be used as an excuse to perpetrate the outrage of censorship on others. — A.C. Grayling

Countries like ours are full of people who have all of the material comforts they desire, yet lead lives of quiet (and at times noisy) desperation, understanding nothing but the fact that there is a hole inside them and that however much food and drink they pour into it, however many motorcars and television sets they stuff it with, however many well-balanced children and loyal friends they parade around the edges of it ... it aches! — Bernard Levin

Television is so influential that when an audience sees you day-in and day-out there's a certain acceptance that sets in; you're no longer a threatening personality. They become more willing to accept whatever you present. — Doc Severinsen

Many of the network television shows have done takeoffs on 'Family Circus,' including 'David Letterman,' 'Friends,' 'Roseanne,' and others, and, in my estimation the use of them is a compliment to the popularity of the feature, which just by mentioning it's name sets up the image of a warm, loving family-type feature. — Bil Keane

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

I've always had an inquisitive mind about everything from flowers to television sets to motor cars. Always pulled them apart - couldn't put 'em back, but always extremely interested in how things work. — Craig Johnston

Twitter is a kind of verbalization of people yelling at their television sets or gnashing their teeth at the newspaper. — Anthony Weiner

The biggest miscalculation the tyrants and despots had made was to convince themselves that their citizens scorned the Western way of life, when in fact the opposite was true: Western ways were the envy of the world. Not only did people want to be able to choose their own leaders, enjoy a free press, and speak their minds freely and openly without fear of reprisal, but they yearned to look and live and love as they pleased. They wanted to wear the current trendy styles and fashions from the US and Europe, follow the exploits of their favourite celebrities, play the newest video games, watch the latest Hollywood blockbusters, binge on television box sets, view pornography, and download the hot new pop songs and videos. — Bruce Paley

Millions who endure poverty and bad government can now know what they are missing. To see how the other half lives all they have to do is switch on their television sets. — Richard M. Nixon

But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. The television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Voice work is usually not that big of a time commitment. You can go in for a couple of days or a couple of months, here and there, and just go in and play. I like being able to do that. You don't have that luxury on film sets or television sets. — James Marsden

As Molly wrapped one of the freshly made flour tortillas around several slices of perfectly cooked steak and piled on guacamole, she began talking. The more she talked, the faster her words came. It was as if she were afraid that someone else would say something or ask her a question. She said that she was working for a firm in Los Angeles that designed sets for television and movies.
"It's different from what you do," she said looking at Boomer. "Sets have to be bigger than life. They have to create an impact. Not boring stuff like the designs for offices."
Elizabeth saw Boomer's eyes flash, but he answered with perfect control, "What's the name of the firm you work for?"
"It's new; it's going through a name change, and they're not sure what name they're going to settle on."
"What movies have they worked on?"
"Oh, a whole bunch. Stuff with Tom Cruise and Johnny Depp. Big movies. — Joyce Swann

It's amazing how many people you see on TV. I did my first television show a month ago, and the next day five million television sets were sold. The people who couldn't sell theirs threw them away. — Bob Hope

Football today is far too much a sport for the few who can play it well; the rest of us, and too many of our children, get out exercise from climbing up the seats in stadiums, or from walking across the room to turn on our television sets. — John F. Kennedy

As parents, can we counter the effect of television violence? One worrying feature in Britain is that so many TV sets are in a child's bedroom; this means that the mediating effect of watching with a parent, the ability to discuss and interpret what has been seen, is lost. — Robert Winston

Many of our own people here in this country do not ask about computers, telephones and television sets. They ask - when will we get a road to our village. — Thabo Mbeki

Once typecast as the indispensable altarpiece of a well-appointed living room, TVs have infected every human environment. The average American household has more television sets than people. — Seth Shostak

My dad, Bob Blum, used to dash across Grand Central's main terminal catwalk several times daily as a young CBS correspondent, running copy from newsroom to studio and back - because CBS' first broadcasts were from Grand Central Terminal. The pictures on people's television sets used to shake when the trains came in! — Jenna Blum

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

Most poets, most good poets even, no longer have the heart to write about what is most terrible in the world of the present: the bombs waiting beside the rockets, the hundreds of millions staring into the temporary shelter of their television sets, the decline of the West that seems less a decline than the fall preceding an explosion. — Randall Jarrell

One of the problems with industrialism is that it's based on the premise of more and more. It has to keep expanding to keep going. More and more television sets. More and more cars. More and more steel, and more and more pollution. We don't question whether we need any more or what we'll do with them. We just have to keep on making more and more if we are to keep going. Sooner or later it's going to collapse ... Look what we have done already with the principle of more and more when it comes to nuclear weapons. — Dora Russell

Essentially, the scripts are not that different. Let's say, in literary terms, it's the difference between writing horizontally and writing vertically. In live television, you wrote much more vertically. You had to probe people because you didn't have money or sets or any of the physical dimensions that film will allow you. So you generally probed people a little bit more. Film writing is much more horizontal. You can insert anything you want: meadows, battlefields, the Taj Mahal, a cast of thousands. But essentially, writing a story is writing a story. — Rod Serling

I watch an awful lot of television, and I get a little tired of what I see ... We have about six television sets in our house, and it's less expensive for me to do a television series than it is for me to throw them all out. — Bill Cosby

Life is not about control or making things happen in the ways we think they should happen. In fact, it's rather arrogant for us to be on this planet that's been here for so long and expect to be able to control life on it. If we want to see changes, then our task is to set things in motion, not to micromanage and make them happen in the ways we think they should. If we have something that is possessing us, such as alcohol or our television sets or our cell phones, then it could be time to let it go and move on with our lives. If we're holding on to resentment and anger, we're simply raising our own stress levels and blood pressure, but we're not contributing anything positive to the situation
and it's time to let it go. — Tom Walsh

I think it does give me different stuff and I feel like television moves a lot faster than movie sets do. It's kinda like they have to get things done within a certain timeframe. So do movies but it seems like, as far as television is concerned, it just moves a helluva lot faster. — Ludacris

Soon, if we are not prudent, millions of people will be watching each other starve to death through expensive television sets — Aneurin Bevan

Why are we, as a nation so obsessed with foreign things? Is it a legacy of our colonial years? We want foreign television sets. We want foreign shirts. We want foreign technology. Why this obsession with everything imported? — A. P. J. Abdul Kalam

I have five television sets. (I like to think of them as a set of five televisions.) I have two DVR boxes, three DVD players, two VHS machines and four stereos. I have nineteen remote controls, mostly in one drawer. — Rick Moranis

The family dinner table is the cornerstone of civilization and those who 'graze' from refrigerators or in front of the television sets are doomed to remain in a state of savagery. — Judith Martin

Let anyone who believes that a high standard of living is the achievement of labor unions and government controls ask himself the following question: If one had a "time machine" and transported the united labor chieftains of America, plus three million government bureaucrats, back to the tenth century - would they be able to provide the medieval serf with electric light, refrigerators, automobiles, and television sets? — Ayn Rand

It's a world creation show [Shadowhunters], so we've gotta work hard in the physical production capacity with the visual effects, the sets and everything. It's not just the real world with two people chatting in a diner. That's tough on a television budget. — Joseph McGinty Nichol

I ... briefly wondered why I kept running into repeat uses of various locations around town. This wasn't the first time I'd dealt with the bad guys choosing to reuse a location different bad guys had used before them. Maybe there was a Villainous Time-share Association. Maybe my life was actually a basic-cable television show, and they couldn't afford to spend money on new sets all the time. — Jim Butcher

Go to the bookstore and look at how many bookshelves are filled with books trying to explain how to work the devices. We don't see shelves of books on how to use television sets, telephones, refrigerators or washing machines. Why should we for computer-based applications? — Donald A. Norman

Plus, I have two television sets. How many does Cal have? Oh, that'd be none. I asked. Yeah, Cal doesn't "believe" in TV. Right. You know what I don't believe in? People who don't believe in TV. — Meg Cabot

In America, Fredericka, they don't really have trains for people. The trains here are used mainly to transport pigs, television sets, and fruit. — Mark Helprin

Other people his age had houses and washing machines, cars and television sets, furniture and gardens and mountain bikes and lawnmowers: he had four boxes of crap, and a set of matchless memories. — Robert Galbraith

I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware, a sensibility that, though frequently obscured during cherry blossom viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-powered television sets, remains steadfast in one of the two cultures from which I come. She had called it "the sadness of being human." A wise, accepting sadness, she had said. I admired her for the depths of character such a description indicated. For me, sad has always been a synonym for bitter, and I suspect this will always be so. — Barry Eisler

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

Archibald MacLeish affirmed that 'A poem should be equal to / not true'. As a defiant statement of poetry's gift for telling truth but telling it slant, this is both cogent and corrective. Yet there are times when a deeper need enters, when we want the poem to be not only pleasurably right but compellingly wise, not only a surprising variation played upon the world, but a retuning of the world itself. We want the surprise to be transitive, like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set, or the electric shock which sets the fibrillating heart back to its proper rhythm. We want what the woman wanted in the prison queue in Leningrad, standing there blue with cold and whispering for fear, enduring the terror of Stalin's regime and asking the poet Anna Akhmatova if she could describe it all, if her art could be equal to it. — Seamus Heaney

There are television sets in every home, every restaurant, every hotel room, every shopping mall-now they're even small enough to carry in your pocket like electronic rosaries. It is an unquestioned part of everyday life. Kneeling before the cathode ray God, with our TV Guide concordance in hand, we maintain the illusion of choice by flipping channels (chapters and verses). It doesn't matter what is flashing on the screen-all that's important is that the TV stays on. — Anton Szandor LaVey

Colleges being nothing but grooming schools for the middle-class non-identity which usually finds its perfect expression on the outskirts of the campus in rows of well-to-do houses with lawns and television sets in each living room with everybody looking at the same thing and thinking the same thing at the same time while the Japhies of the world go prowling in the wilderness to hear the voice crying in the wilderness, to find the ecstacy of the stars, to find the dark mysterious secret of the origin of faceless wonderless crapulous civilization. — Jack Kerouac

Now, all America sits in front of television sets and those television sets exude, I am sorry to say, a considerable amount of radioactive material. It's not huge, you know, but it's enough so that people who have made a habit of watching TV ... get the TV radiation. — L. Ron Hubbard

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

My day job is writing for television. So I've been on enough sets, and I know how things work. — Tom Scharpling

I come from an everyday middle class family in India. The film industry reached us only through our television sets and cinema halls. — Lavrenti Lopes

Under capitalism the common man enjoys amenities which in ages gone by were unknown and therefore inaccessible even to the richest people. But, of course, these motorcars, television sets and refrigerators do not make a man happy. In the instant in which he acquires them, he may feel happier than he did before. But as soon as some of his wishes are satisfied, new wishes spring up. Such is human nature. — Ludwig Von Mises

We are drawn to our television sets each April the way we are drawn to the scene of an accident. — Vincent Canby

I've been on sets where I broke my ankle on a television show doing a stunt playing Arthur in 'Camelot.' That was because it was really rushed, and it hadn't been thought through properly. — Jamie Campbell Bower

The civilized want people to make their living individually, and they want them to live separately, behind locked doors - one family to a house, each house fully stocked with refrigerators, television sets, washing machines, and so on. — Daniel Quinn

It's easy to underestimate how profound and holistic Roddenberry's vision of the techscape of the future was. By today's standards, the available technology of 1964 was downright primitive. Doors did not open automatically when we approached them. The first handheld calculator was still in the future, as were microwave ovens and cell phones. 1964 was a year before most Americans had even heard of a place called Vietnam, five years before man walked on the moon, 25 years before anyone ever surfed the Internet. Your phone had a curly cord, and the new innovation of "touchtone" dialing was merely a year old. Even the television sets that viewers watched would be considered positively prehistoric today. Most TVs were black-and-white models, and the majority of those sets had no remote control. There was no cable or satellite; rabbit ears and roof-top antennas were the norm. The world looked, and was, different. — Marc Cushman

The men who are not interested in philosophy need it most urgently: they are most helplessly in its power. The men who are not interested in philosophy absorb its principles from the cultural atmosphere around them-from schools, colleges, books, magazines, newspapers, movies, television, etc. Who sets the tone of a culture? A small handful of men: the philosophers. Others follow their lead, either by conviction or by default. — Ayn Rand

Short of throwing away all television sets, I really don't know what we can do about writing. — Phyllis A. Whitney

The most dreadful thing of all is that many millions of people in the poor countries are going to starve to death before our eyes. We shall see them doing so upon our television sets. — C.P. Snow