Television Watching Quotes:

Reading not only enlarges and challenges the mind; it also engages and exercises the brain. Today's youth who sits mesmerized by a television screen is not going to be tomorrow's leader. Television watching is passive. Reading is active.

- Richard M. Nixon

topic: Reading, Exercise, Television Watching, Mesmerized, Today's Youth

[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

topic: Television Watching, Cells, Years, Gamma Rays

Watching television requires no skills and develops no skills. That is why there is no such thing as remedial television-watching.

- Neil Postman

source: Neil Postman (2011). “Building a Bridge to the 18th Century: How the Past Can Improve Our Future”, p.201, Vintage

topic: Television Watching, Skills, Television, Watching Television

Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.

- Bill Hicks

topic: Inspirational, Funny, Eye, Spray, Spray Paint

If you read a lot of books you are considered well read. But if you watch a lot of TV, you're not considered well viewed.

- Lily Tomlin

topic: Book, Watches, Tvs, Watching Television, Television Watching

Before I was shot, I always thought that I was more half-there than all-there - I always suspected that I was watching TV instead of living life. Right when I was being shot and ever since, I knew that I was watching television.

- Andy Warhol

source: Andy Warhol (2014). “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again”, p.104, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

topic: Watching Television, Commercial Art, Television Watching, Assassination

We owe a lot to Thomas Edison - if it wasn't for him, we'd be watching television by candlelight.

- Milton Berle

topic: Funny Inspirational, Luck, Progress, Watching Television, Candlelight

Television watching does reduce reading and often encroaches on homework. Much of it is admittedly the intellectual equivalent of junk food. But in some respects, such as its use of standard written English, television watching is acculturative.

- Edward Hirsch

topic: Reading, Intellectual, Junk, Television Watching

Child psychologists have demonstrated that our minds are actually constructed by these thousands of tiny interactions during the first few years of life. We aren't just what we're taught. It's what we experience during those early years - a smile here, a jarring sound there - that creates the pathways and connections of the brain. We put our kids to fifteen years of quick-cut advertising, passive television watching, and sadistic video games, and we expect to see emerge a new generation of calm, compassionate, and engaged human beings?

- Sidney Poitier

source: Sidney Poitier (2009). “The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography”, p.6, Harper Collins

topic: Children, Kids, Cutting, Sadistic, Years Of Life

Television watching should more properly be called television staring; it engages eye and ear simultaneously in a relentless and persistent way and leaves no room for daydreaming. This is what makes watching such an inferior form of leisure

- Witold Rybczynski

topic: Eye, Ears, Television, Television Watching

Again and again parents describe...the trancelike nature of their children's television watching. The child's facial expression is transformed. The jaw is relaxed and hangs open slightly; the tongue rests on the front teeth. The eyes have a glazed, vacuous look.

- Marie Winn

topic: Children, Eye, Expression, Vacuous, Facial

I was always singing and dancing for my mother when I wasn't glued to the television watching I Love Lucy or the Carol Burnett Show.

- Debra Messing

topic: Mother, Dancing, Singing, Carols, Television Watching

The six and one-fourth hours' television watching (the American average per day) which non-reading children do is what is called alpha-level learning. The mind needn't make any pictures since the pictures are provided, so the mind cuts current as low as it can.

- Carol Bly

source: Carol Bly (1990). “The passionate, accurate story: making your heart's truth into literature”

topic: Children, Reading, Cutting, Television Watching

The early commentators who put down the pre-presidential Roosevelt as an empty-headed young lightweight, all ambition and no talent, now seem comically wrong to a modern book-reading, movie-going, television-watching, legend-loving American public conditioned to think of him as one of the presidential giants on the order of Washington and Lincoln.

- Russell Baker

topic: Book, Reading, Ambition, Television Watching