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If people are watching television by themselves, it makes them part of a community of people laughing.
Sep 29, 2025
I don't think you can read poetry while you're watching television very well.
Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
I learned how to speak English watching television.
If I hear the word 'retire,' it makes me want to throw up. And then do what? Sit around all day watching television?
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.
Reading the Gospels, without the personality of Jesus, is like watching television with the sound turned off.
I'm very shy really. I spend a lot of time in my room alone reading or writing or watching television.
Disparagement of television is second only to watching television as an American pastime.
All right, let's get to work again!-This is the spirit of people of genuine substance. Those who avoid hard work or neglect the things they have to do, who just while away their time, eating, sleeping, playing, watching television-such individuals will never experience true happiness, satisfaction or joy.
I realise how important it is to use the time I have. I respect people who want to do that by watching television. I happen to want to read books. But I know I can't read all the books or watch all the movies in one lifetime.
It's just amazing how television permeates the entire world from people who are just listeners and viewers to people of considerable importance who find relaxation watching television. Somebody called it a talking lamp. Television, that is.
If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something - just by staying alive.
You know you're out of shape when you have a heart attack when you're watching television.
I don't think there is anybody who's watching television right now who wants to see something because it looks good rather than feel something because it feels right or familiar or new or whatever.
Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.
My first serious girlfriend, when I was 16, was Mormon. I went to her house for 'family home evening,' and I was like, 'Why aren't you people ignoring each other and watching television?'
Let people who do not know what to do with themselves in this life, but fritter away their time reading magazines and watching television, hope for eternal life... The life I want is a life I could not endure in eternity. It is a life of love and intensity, suffering and creation, that makes life worthwhile and death welcome. There is no other life I should prefer. Neither should I like not to die.
Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
People are worse educated than they used to be. Certainly they are not very interested in reading books, as opposed to watching television, movies. They are used to getting things through the eye and the ear. In a small way, literature goes on being written, but few people like it. Once it's bureaucratized by the schoolteachers, the game's up.
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on.
When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.
Another activity that can detract us from the proper way is watching television excessively or viewing improper movies. While fine productions on these media are uplifting and entertaining, we need to be very selective in choosing what we see and how much of our time such an activity deserves. Our precious time must not be diverted to the sideline attractions of vulgar language, immoral conduct, pornography, and violence.
The mood state Americans are in, on average, when watching television is mildly depressed.
The hours spent viewing TV are hours not available for actively participating in the real world, or playing, or being involved with friends and family. Watching television is an individual activity that tends to discourage interaction with others; as viewing time increases, family communication time decreases. As family communication decreases, people grow more distant from each other and may even forget how to carry on a good conversation.
If you can deal with hot emotions, then you can study for the S.A.T. instead of watching television, and you can save more money for retirement. It's not just about marshmallows.
I don't use the big video screens that a lot of other artists use because personally, I think it's kind of a crutch. I think sometimes it's like watching television as opposed to really getting involved with what is happening onstage and the people in your section.
Every time someone does a Western movie, people flock to it. It's like, we're continually programming to people who are least likely to watch us. People in Nebraska aren't watching things on the computer, they're watching television. Why aren't we programming things for them? We only program things that appeal to New York and Los Angeles and in many ways spit on the rest of the country.
It is commonly agreed that children spend more hours per year watching television than in the classroom, and far less in actual conversation with their parents.
Chilling out on the bed in your hotel room watching television, while wearing your own pajamas, is sometimes the best part of a vacation.
Television has changed the American child from an irresistable force to an immovable object.
Opera once was an important social instrument - especially in Italy. With Rossini and Verdi, people were listening to opera together and having the same catharsis with the same story, the same moral dilemmas. They were holding hands in the darkness. That has gone. Now perhaps they are holding hands watching television.
Gambling is not as destructive as war or as boring as pornography. It is not as immoral as business or as suicidal as watching television. And the percentages are better than religion.
When you're watching television, you don't want to watch a show where everything just works out. You don't want to see a relationship that's just blossoming and everyone's happy and sunshine and roses all the time. That's also not true in life.
Watching television in those days was not the same experience as it is today. After years of listening to radio, we found the black-and-white images mesmerizing.
Everyone has a purpose in life. Perhaps yours is watching television.
I'm not sure I'd classify any topics as off-limits, but I don't look for new territories to offend. There's my joke about when my roommate beat cancer. People talk about cancer survivors like they're warriors, but from where I was sitting, she was just watching television and eating soup. Like, did she go to war? No. She kind of just sat around.
I keep saying we've got 92 million Americans on the beach. They're not working, and they're all eating, and they're all making phone calls, and they're all watching television. But they're not working. You mean to tell me if you tell them that to keep all that they're going to have to get a job, that that is a detriment to your campaign?
After once having made the mistake of watching television news, I had worried for a while about an asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out human civilization. The anchorwoman had said it was not merely possible but probable. At the end of the report, she smiled.
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.
I do think this is where television is going, and I think that it's awesome to be a part of a show like this because we are these pioneers into this new medium. And it's working. When you look at the success of House of Cards and Arrested Development, which I love, this is how people are watching television now. It's pretty cool to be a part of this whole thing.
Without conjuring up fantasies of bygone eras with family games and long, leisurely meals, the question arises: isn't there a better family life available than this dismal, mechanized arrangement of children watching television for however long is allowed them, evening after evening?
The freedom to be someone else entirely and be different versions of something. That's what I loved and I loved watching movies and I loved watching television, I loved reading books. That kind of escapism into another world was my favorite thing.
American movie audiences now just don’t seem to be very interested in any kind of ambiguity or any kind of real complexity of character or narrative - I’m talking in large numbers, there are always some, but enough to make hits out of movies that have those qualities. I think those qualities are now being seen on television and that people who want to see stories that have those kinds of qualities are watching television.
When you read a book, you generate beta waves irrespective of the book's content. But if you look up from it, and start watching TV - it doesn't matter what the content of the program is - the beta waves disappear and you start processing alpha and theta waves. These are the same waves that you generate during meditation. Reading is primarily left hemisphere and watching television is primarily right hemisphere. Now how could that not have a major effect on our culture?
Sometimes when I'm watching television and something, an image, will come on that has to do with 9/11 or some of these families telling their stories, or children talking about drawing pictures of airplanes flying into towers, you know, I find myself still choking up.
Even if every program were educational and every advertisement bore the seal of approval of the American Dental Association, we would still have a critical problem. It's not just the programs but the act of watching television hour after hour after hour that's destructive.
I get scripts all the time, but I read this [Baggage Claim] thoroughly, and I loved it. It was light hearted, cute, sweet, and funny. I told my agent that I liked the script, but I did let my acceptance of the role slide a little, until I was watching television one day; scrolling through the stations, and there was this play. And I don't like plays made for the screen. But, this one, "Suddenly Single", caught my attention.
...as absurd and dishonest as claiming that the trouble with computer games is that they stop people watching television.
There is a mass of people, we might as well admit, who if they weren't watching television, would be doing absolutely nothing else.