Tom Lehrer Quotes

TV - a clever contraction derived from the words Terrible Vaudeville. However, it is our latest medium - we call it a medium because nothing's well done.

It is clearly disgusting and completely inappropriate.

It's not brain surgery. It's not nuclear physics. It's television. It's only television.

And it's not only films, I'm pretty unaware of anything that's going on in popular culture right now.

Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry.

Television and radio do a wonderful job in focusing attention on the problems of our society.

There are no Dave Marrs anymore.

Television was supposed to be a national park. Instead it has become a money machine. It's a commodity now, just like pork bellies.

I understand the process of politics and the game of television.

The whole idea of television news or any kind of news is to inform people about things they need to know about.

Life doesn't imitate art, it imitates bad television.

We never really tried to shock for shock's sake on 'Family Guy'. If something was horribly offensive and shocking, we would put it in if it was also hysterically funny.

Broadcasting is plastic; while it can ape the press, it can also emulate the arts.

Television, as you know, can kind of jettison you into a whole new world.

I'm pretty gross. When I talk I can be gross and crude.

We have always had gross humor. But we try for funny, not gross.

Television has spread the habit of instant reaction and has stimulated the hope of instant results.

Nothing is really real unless it “happens” on television…Television has brought an inversion of our consciousness. When we take our eyes off the tube, we see things that are not quite authentic – or rather, which gain authenticity only by their resemblance to how things happen on television

Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

Television has shortened our political discourse.

History must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts over the future of the nation.

Television brought the brutality of war into the comfort of the living room. Vietnam was lost in the living rooms of America—not on the battlefields of Vietnam.

Television is the medium through which society communicates its democratic values.

Sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit-and-loss sheet or rating book to distract you—and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

Television has become the primary precinct of politics.