Kurt Vonnegut Quotes

Television has tremendous power over our lives.

There's no denying that television is one of the most powerful propaganda media we've ever invented.

Mass communication, radio, and especially television, have attempted, not without success, to annihilate every possibility of solitude and reflection.

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

Radio and films, and now television, open for us a window onto everything that goes on throughout the world: the events—and the ideas too—of all humanity invade our homes day after day

Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist - the legitimiser of our egos.

Television really has been responsible for everything that I've done successfully.

Television was the most revolutionary event of the century. Its importance was in a class with the discovery of gunpowder and the invention of the printing press, which changed the human condition for centuries afterward.

Television is the quickest form of recognition in the world.

There is no difference between acute schizophrenia and a world at war.

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

We're exposed to ideas everywhere. The world is full of ideas. I think that television is a pretty powerful medium in that regard.

I think television has had a vast, unbelievable impact on us.

We develop social systems for the handicapped, but when you're handicapped in your mind, society doesn't handle those situations well. I think we don't recognize or acknowledge the power of messages and how deeply affected we all are by the messages we receive from the media.

All you see on television are debased images.

Television enjoys a de facto monopoly on what goes into the heads of a significant part of the population and what they think.

I've always thought that it's good to watch the news to find out what everybody else is looking at and believing, if only because that's how consensus is constructed.

Television has made places look alike, and it has transformed the way we see. A whole generation of Americans, maybe two, has grown up looking at the world through a lens.

Television is generally on the conservative side, so if you're seeing it represented on TV, that probably means it's really out there in the real world.

Television is an instrument which can paralyze this country.

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

During the last 20 years the advent of radio changed all the old rules of political campaigning. Now the successful advent of television, available for the first time this year in a presidential campaign, must again influence the planning of the campaign. Television, with its triple advantages of sight, sound and motion, can make or break a candidate, a party or a platform. In my opinion television must not be considered as supplementary media but as the heart of your program to “win friends and influence people.”

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 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.

I believe television is going to be the test of the modern world, and that in this new opportunity to see beyond the range of our vision we shall discover either a new and unbearable disturbance of the general peace or a saving radiance in the sky. We shall stand or fall by television — of that I am quite sure.