Top 1200 American Television Quotes & Sayings - Page 5

Television in the 1960s & 70s had just as much dross and the programmes were a lot more tediously patronising than they are now. Memory truncates occasional gems into a glittering skein of brilliance. More television, more channels means more good television and, of course, more bad. The same equation applies to publishing, film and, I expect, sumo wrestling.

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?

Television is perhaps the greatest medium ever discovered to teach and educate and even to entertain. But the filth, the rot, the violence, and the profanity that spew from television screens into our homes is deplorable. It is a sad commentary on our society. The fact that a television set is on six or seven hours every day in most of the homes of America says something of tremendous importance.

I grew up with a dad who hated television, so we had to sneak television. It got ingrained in my head to never follow a show that religiously.

When helicopters were snatching people from the grounds of the American embassy compound during the panic of the final Vietcong push into Saigon, I was sitting in front of the television set shouting, Get the chefs! Get the chefs!

I may have disparaged the idea that people are looking at films on smaller and smaller screens... it's a shame that people have to watch DVDs with the lights on in a television-type situation where people are wandering in and out of the room. Movies are different from television, and you cannot watch movies like television. It distorts it.

It is television; we're making television at the end of the day. It's all smoke and mirrors, and it's all fake, but it's not, because it makes people really feel things that are real.

There were no competitions on television. The first skating competition I ever remember seeing on television was the 1968 Olympics when Peggy Fleming won.

I love great prestige television, but because I make television, sometimes I don't want to, like, you know, fall into a very heavy cerebral drama.

Local television news, on both radio and television, is so appalling. Makes print journalism look like the greatest stuff ever written.

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.

I spent most of my time as an actor in television, so directors in television - it's such a machine that's already in place that I don't think you notice the direction as much on the set.

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.

I'm obviously an American citizen. My parents are American citizens. But I'm not looked at as an American.

I'm a television presenter, television is my first love.

When I first envisioned 'Funny Games' in the mid-1990s, it was my intention to have an American audience watch the movie. It is a reaction to a certain American cinema, its violence, its naivety, the way American cinema toys with human beings. In many American films, violence is made consumable.

One of the reasons a strategist never sits in a stadium and gets caught up in the crowds - and never sits watching a debate in person - is because the vast majority of American voters watch these political events on television.

When you're a doctor and you spend most of your life in a hospital, you honestly don't get to watch as much television as you think you might, and the power of television is enormous.

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.

There is danger in the concentration of control in the television and radio networks, especially in the large television and radio stations; danger in the concentration of ownership in the press...and danger in the increasing concentration of selection by book publishers and reviewers and by the producers of radio and television programs.

Television is just the wrong medium, at least in prime time, to teach science. I think it is hopeless if it insists on behaving like television. . . .

I believe America wants and needs the shared experience of television. We far too often see in crises how television brings us together.

Satellite communications connect television screens in Japan with television cameras in England, and the distance of half a world loses its meaning.

The future of television is not on television but online. A majority of us are turning to our computers and mobile devices for news and entertainment, Millennials especially.

When I was a kid, I had ambitions for being a television announcer, which was before television took off, you know, in the late '40s.

I did television for a very long time, but if you're on television, words don't count. What the eye sees beats the words. If you switch sides, from radio to television, you learn that the wordiness that you learn on the radio is useless or not nearly as powerful, and you have to learn to trust that the eye will just beat the ear.

There's a level of action unlike anything else on television. AMC always makes distinctive television and I think that certainly fits that requirement.

I'm not an American but I have always had the outsiders' respect for the American people and the American way.

[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.

For thousands and thousands of American kids, libraries are the only safe place they can find to study, a haven free from the dangers of street or the numbing temptations of television. As schools cut back services, the library looms even more important to countless children.

African-Americans are not a monolithic group. So, we tend to talk about the black community, the black culture, the African-American television viewing audience, but there are just as many facets of us as there are other cultures.

It's not enough to be American. You always have to be something else, Irish-American, German-American, and you'd wonder how they'd get along if someone hadn't invented the hyphen

I think there's a pride of what a real American can be. I mean, I'm a transplant, but I've got American kids and an American wife, and when I go back to England I feel more like an American, the way I look at the world, is more from an American perspective at this point. I've traveled every state 30 or 40 times, and have met an amazing array of people, and I have found Americans to be among the most kind and tolerant people I have ever met.

'Doctor Who' is the most original science-fiction television series ever made. It is also one of the longest-running television shows of all time.

Getting into the banjo and discovering that it was an African-American instrument, it totally turned on its head my idea of American music - and then, through that, American history.

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.

Television isn't inherently good or bad. You go to a bookstore, there are how many thousands of books, but how many of those do you want? Five? Television's the same way. If you're going to show people stuff, television is the way to go. Words and pictures show things.

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.

I love television, I've always wanted to be on television.

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.

Together we can save American lives, American jobs, and American futures.

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.

No, I’m not an American. I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the … victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy. So, I’m not standing here speaking to you as an American, or a patriot, or a flag-saluter, or a flag-waver - no, not I. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.

I like television. I still believe that television is the most powerful form of communication on Earth - I just hate what is being done with it.

It's too bad that television needs so much material and does not leave time for quality writing. That's one of the things I have against television.

People say I owe a lot to television. The fact is I was a star long before television. What TV made me is unemployed.

I've done a lot of television over the last years, and you know, with some television productions, if you can do with just one take, you can move on and do something else.

I think I'm better wired for television. I love variety as far as a project. I'm easily bored and the schedule of a television show, it just keeps you going.

I don't have a television, and I'm just not too up on television.

I got the feeling: It's time to do a Marco Polo story. I felt like everything was lining up right because long-form television series were becoming to me like the new great American novel.

We should really focus on an American First agenda, and these climate pacts and climate regulations have been designed to not necessarily give American workers and the American environment a head start. It really gives our competition a greater ability to compete internationally and disadvantage American companies.

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.

As far as the difference for me between television and movies, I really thrill to the pace of television. As exhausting as it can be - there was actually one day when we never went to bed.

I think there's a lot of anesthesia being - that's been pumped into American culture, the mass media television, various forms of entertainment, and the illusion of wealth that we now understand to be an illusion as well as the illusion that America is a world power.

I was born an American, I live like an American, I will die an American.

Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)

My company, Cinema Gypsy, produced a podcast, 'Bronzeville,' in conjunction with Larenz Tate and his brothers that we're developing into a television show. It deals with a very tight-knit African-American community in Chicago in 1947 and people who run a numbers wheel.

I was born an American; I will live an American; I shall die an American.

Each day, the American housewife turns toward television as toward a lover. She feels guilty about it, and well she might, for he's covered with warts and is only after her money.

All television is educational television. The question is: what is it teaching?