Televised Quotes

The human condition is not served by our technical ability to transmit a televised image around the world - if that image is totally inane. ~ Ken Danby

But witnesses incur responsibilities, as anyone who has ever seen a traffic accident and had to go to court to testify, knows. In the new world of globally televised war crimes, the defence of 'not knowing,' or neutrality, will dissolve for everyone. To be a witness or bystander is not a value-free choice but, inadvertently, a moral position; and in this sense the 'guilt' of people who live with the memory of crimes committed by members of their families, or communities, has been unwittingly extended to everyone who watches appalling pictures on the news. ~ Erna Paris

John Kennedy won the first televised presidential debate among those watching it, while Richard Nixon won among those listening on the radio. ~ Susan Estrich

With my own memoirs, they are truthful, and I write everything fully expecting to some day end up televised on Court TV, and I'm fully prepared to be challenged legally on it. ~ Augusten Burroughs

There's always been a little bit of tension between the writers of science fiction literature and then science-fiction televised shows or movies, partly because they have a different dynamic. ~ John Scalzi

The Spirit Awards are great too, they'll say anything because they're not televised. Another great drinking night. ~ William H. Macy

[Ruth Bader] Ginsburg, the former women's rights advocate, made sure the nation knew she was there, even if alone. When President Obama addressed a joint session of Congress for the first time in February 2009, Ginsburg was recovering from pancreatic cancer and chemotherapy treatments, but she dragged herself to the evening event and sat with her brethren. She said she wanted to make sure that people watching the nationally televised address saw that the Supreme Court had at least one woman. ~ Joan Biskupic

Are You Ready for New Urban Fragrances?

Yeah, I guess I'm ready, but listen:

Perfume is a disguise. Since the middle ages, we have worn masks of fruit and flowers in order to conceal from ourselves the meaty essence of our humanity. We appreciate the sexual attractant of the rose, the ripeness of the orange, more than we honor our own ripe carnality.

Now today we want to perfume our cities, as well; to replace their stinging fumes of disturbed fossils' sleep with the scent of gardens and orchards. Yet, humans are not bees any more than they are blossoms. If we must pull an olfactory hood over our urban environment, let it be of a different nature.

I want to travel on a train that smells like snowflakes.

I want to sip in cafes that smell like comets.

Under the pressure of my step, I want the streets to emit the precise odor of a diamond necklace.

I want the newspapers I read to smell like the violins left in pawnshops by weeping hobos on Christmas Eve.

I want to carry luggage that reeks of the neurons in Einstein's brain.

I want a city's gases to smell like the golden belly hairs of the gods.

And when I gaze at a televised picture of the moon, I want to detect, from a distance of 239,000 miles, the aroma of fresh mozzarella. ~ Tom Robbins

Things get better when Joy hears about a televised way to sell products and makes a connection with QVC. She convinces an executive there, played by Bradley Cooper, to let her appear as herself. ~ Kenneth Turan

Perhaps I was hosting my own personal sexual revolution. You know the kind that will not be televised. ~ Sabrina Childress

We forgave, followed and accepted because we liked the way he looked. And he had a pretty wife. Camelot was fun, even for the peasants, as long as it was televised to their huts. ~ Joe McGinniss

Politicians in our times feed their clichés to television, where even those who wish to disagree repeat them. Television purports to challenge political language by conveying images, but the succession from one frame to another can hinder a sense of resolution. Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean.

The effort to define the shape and significance of events requires words and concepts that elude us when we are entranced by visual stimuli. Watching televised news is sometimes little more than looking at someone who is also looking at a picture. We take this collective trance to be normal. We have slowly fallen into it.

More than half a century ago, the classic novels of totalitarianism warned of the domination of screens, the suppression of books, the narrowing of vocabularies, and the associated difficulties of thought. In Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, firemen find and burn books while most citizens watch interactive television. In George Orwell's 1984, published in 1949, books are banned and television is two-way, allowing the government to observe citizens at all times. In 1984, the language of visual media is highly constrained, to starve the public of the concepts needed to think about the present, remember the past, and consider the future. One of the regime's projects is to lim ~ Timothy Snyder

You can't guarantee everything's going to be televised. ~ Brian Lamb

I think the government should be spying on all Arabs, engaging in torture as a televised spectator sport, dropping daisy cutters wantonly throughout the Middle East and sending liberals to Guantanamo. ~ Ann Coulter

'Dating Game' wasn't social commentary, political analysis, Shakespearean-level drama or even blunt-force comedy. It was just the televised equivalent of meeting someone at a bar. But it appealed to our most basic Darwinian instinct: selecting a good mate. You can't go wrong when a show's premise is hard-wired into human DNA. ~ Seth Shostak

Astonishing times. Who would have imagined that the Crazy Gang would yield a Hollywood film star (Vinny Jones), a British television ever-present (John Fashanu) and now a televised African dance champion? ~ Giles Smith

We made love on the living room floor with the noise in the background of a televised war and in that defeaning pleasure i thought i heard someone say if we walk away they'll walk away ~ Conor Oberst

The N-word is certainly not a word that has, as many suggest, been kept alive solely by hip-hop and rap artists. White people have been keeping the word alive and well too. Any movie about slavery or black history could reasonably include the word a few times just to remind us of how terrible we all used to be, to remind us of the work we have yet to do. And still, the televised version of Roots manages to depict the realities of slavery without the N-word and the miniseries is nearly ten hours long. ~ Roxane Gay

I hated Matthew Bourne's 'Swan Lake' when it first turned up, and then when it was televised, and then when it returned. ~ Robert Gottlieb

Bliss - a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom. ~ David Foster Wallace

Everything happens fast, but nothing actually happens. Each story on televised news is "breaking" until it is displaced by the next one. So we are hit by wave upon wave but never see the ocean. The ~ Timothy Snyder

If it's not televised, there's no way Americans will know about competitive badminton. All they know is the back-yard thing. ~ Howard Bach

Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second-guessing in The New York Review of Books. ~ John Updike

At first, I was shocked that Diane could even suggest this family reunion [on television], and then I realized this is just the way of the world, or at least the way of fin de siecle America. Not only would the next revolution be televised, but so would every other little stupid thing. It was already happening: Television reunions between adopted children and their birth parents ... ~ Elizabeth Wurtzel

Books had instant replay long before televised sports. ~ Bernard Williams

The last few years I became a lot more into sports. Growing up, the sports I liked were independent sports, like skateboarding. I was really into skateboarding, and not necessarily team televised sports. ~ Mark Hoppus

We all live in a televised goldfish bowl. ~ Kingman Brewster, Jr.

Obviously, the Sixties was a time when everyone wanted to experiment, and then everything became very formulated and corporate, so artists tended to get pushed into a kind of pattern. Now, I think that has continued with the emergence of televised talent shows like 'X Factor.' ~ Steve Winwood

Not long time ago there was a striking example of the extent to which English has diverged: a television company put out a programme filmed in the English city of Newcastle, where the local variety of English is famously divergent and difficult, and the televised version was accompanied by English subtitles! ~ Larry Trask

A narrow and distorted picture of America often emerges from the televised news. A single dramatic piece of the mosaic becomes, in the minds of millions, the entire picture. ~ Spiro T. Agnew

The Revolution won't be televised. It's already available on Amazon in ebook format. ~ Kenya Wright

Don't make that mistake again," he said in a voice so quiet it was barely audible. He looked as if all his latent hostilities were waiting for an excuse to turn on her. "If you throw that cup at me, so help me, I'll carry you over and put you down in the punch bowl!"
"You and the CIA, maybe!" Cecily hissed. "Go ahead and try…!"
Tate actually took a step toward her just as Colby managed to get between them. "Now, now," he cautioned.
Cecily wasn't backing down an inch. Neither was Tate. He'd gone from lazy affection and indulgent amusement to bristling antagonism in the space of weeks. Lately he flew into a rage if Cecily's name was mentioned, but Colby hadn't told her that.
"You have no right to make that kind of insinuation about me," she said through her teeth. "I don't get jobs lying on my back, and you know it!"
Tate's black eyes narrowed. He looked formidable, but Cecily wasn't intimidated by him. She never had been. He glanced at her hands, which were clenched on her cup, and then back to her rigid features. It had infuriated him to be the object of televised ridicule at the political dinner, and Audrey's comments had only made things worse. He was carrying a grudge. But as he looked at Cecily, he felt an emptiness in his very soul. This woman had been a thorn in his side for years, ever since an impulsive act of compassion had made her his responsibility. In those days, she'd been demure and sweet and dependent on him, and her shy hero worship ~ Diana Palmer

Halfway through the televised debate I kick my boot into the screen. Even on mute I can't stand it. It feels good to smash the TV, though. I feel like I'm participating in the political system. ~ Joey Comeau

I was the candidate first time a Green or any progressive third party has ever been in a national televised debate. I was in five of them. And the response from the public was overwhelming. ~ Peter Camejo

I'm a pastor of a local church. I'm not a televangelist. I've never had a televised program. I'm a pastor. A pastor's role is to care and comfort, encourage, teach, and everything that I do, even when I meet with world leaders, is from a pastor's heart. ~ Rick Warren

A zen couch potato is a person who contemplates the nature of televised existence. ~ Richard Helms

If you're going to be part of a nationally televised show that airs live and do sketches that haven't even been brainstormed a week earlier, you really can't be afraid to fail. ~ Casey Wilson

But the truth is it's hard for me to know what I really think about any of the stuff I've written. It's always tempting to sit back and make finger-steeples and invent impressive sounding theoretical justifications for what one does, but in my case most of it'd be horseshit. As time passes I get less and less nuts about anything I've published, and it gets harder to know for sure when its antagonistic elements are in there because they serve a useful purpose and when their just covert manifestations of this "look-at-me-please-love-me-I-hate you" syndrome I still sometimes catch myself falling into. Anyway, but what I think I meant by "antagonize" or "aggravate" has to do with the stuff in the TV essay about the younger writer trying to struggle against the cultural hegemony of TV. One thing TV does is help us deny that we're lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It's an anesthesia of "form." The interesting thing is why we're so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don't have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I'm going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I'm not sure I could give you a steeple-fingere ~ David Foster Wallace

Now there are reports that Osama bin Laden would like to commit suicide on television. This is the kind of lead-in I have been praying for every since I came to CBS. Bin Laden is planning a televised suicide or, as I call it, hosting the Academy Awards. ~ David Letterman

A magazine feature can reach hundreds of thousands of potential customers for a fashion brand. The way to reach a billion? Dress the actresses competing for attention at a highly televised event. ~ Tamara Mellon

If you listen to 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,' by Gil Scott-Heron, that album is dripping with rage. ~ Henry Rollins

Haymitch Abernathy, a paunchy, middle-aged man, who at this moment appears hollering something unintelligible, staggers onto the stage, and falls into the third chair. He's drunk. Very. The crowd responds with its token applause, but he's confused and tries to give Effie Trinket a big hug, which she barely manages to fend off. The mayor looks distressed. Since all of this is being televised, right now District 12 is the laughingstock of Panem, and he knows it. He quickly tries to pull the attention back to the reaping by introducing Effie Trinket. Bright ~ Suzanne Collins

Ramp skating has become the most popular televised form of skating because they can constrain it. They can judge it based on what's happening within this box of a ramp. ~ Jeffrey Deitch

If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous
and it is. ~ Anne Lamott

There just isn't enough televised Chess ~ David Letterman

His separation from the rest of society is beyond vast. But we are not working within the parameters of reality; we are working within the parameters of televised sport. And that's a critical difference. It essentially makes Ralph Sampson a tall, emotive, representational nonhuman slave. And within these parameters, four thousand rebounds don't mean shit. ~ Chuck Klosterman

There's even an 1892 novel called Golf in the Year 2000 that (somewhat incredibly) predicts the advent of televised sports. ~ Chuck Klosterman

When I went to college, we had a very good local following, but stations only televised two or three NCAA games a season. And when I went to Europe, once in a while we had a good crowd, but usually not. ~ Sue Wicks

Most of the time our events aren't in the papers and they're not televised, so people don't know when we're competing. ~ Sanya Richards-Ross

How can we protect ourselves from a culture of manipulation, where tastes and flavors are re-created chemically in laboratories and given to us as natural food, where religion is packaged, televised and tweeted and commercials influence us to such an extent that they dictate not only what we eat, wear, read and want but what and how we dream. We need the pristine beauty of truth as revealed to us in fiction, poetry, music and the arts: we need to retrieve the third eye of imagination. ~ Azar Nafisi

Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised. ~ Marilyn Manson

Are you kidding? This is crazy, man. I thought I was Mr. Pre-Televised awards. ~ TobyMac

Hollywood and Disneyland are the legacy of Europe's cultural imperialism. We gave them nursery rhymes and they gave back film. Televised riots are as American as Barbie/ Big Macs. Tomorrow the riots will be forgotten but Mickey mouse will still be there. Welcome to Disneyland. ~ Richey Edwards

Romney had tried to explain his reasoning to this chorus of confidants, but they were still urging him not to shut the door. They contended that even if he didn't want to launch a formal campaign right now, it would be a mistake to take himself entirely out of the running. They laid out a vivid, detailed scenario in which a fractured Republican Party - divided by a wide field of niche presidential candidates - fails to unite behind a single nominee in 2016, and ends up with a chaotic, historic floor fight at the national convention. Facing a televised descent into disarray, the GOP delegates would naturally turn to Romney - the fully vetted, steady-handed Republican statesman - for salvation. Your party might still need you, Mitt's loyalists insisted. The country might still need you! ~ McKay Coppins