Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room by people you wouldn’t have in your home.

I’m always amazed that people will actually choose to sit in front of the television and just be savaged by stuff that belittles their intelligence.

Television was the ultimate evidence of cultural anemia.

Television has proved that people will look at anything rather than each other.

Don’t you wish there were a knob on the TV to turn up the intelligence? There’s one marked “Brightness,” but it doesn’t work.

Television’s perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don’t have to concentrate. You don’t have to react. You don’t have to remember. You don’t miss your brain because you don’t need it.

Time slides by: on television
The soaps dissolve, the jingles change.
Defeat or pity or derision
Constricts our hearts. Our looks grow strange
Even to us.

We are bombarded today by such a quantity of images that we can no longer distinguish direct experience from what we have seen for a few seconds on television. The memory is littered with bits and pieces of images, like a rubbish dump.

Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen.

Television is a gift of God, and God will hold those who utilize His divine instrument accountable to Him.