I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.
Watching TV gives you confidence. When you see how stupid people generally are on the box it makes you feel smart. And scientific studies show that people who feel smart perform better than people who feel stupid.
Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn’t change people’s habits. It just kept them inside the house.
So, please, oh please, we beg, we pray, go throw your TV set away, and in its place you can install, a lovely bookcase on the wall.
One of the few good things about modern times: If you die horribly on television, you will not have died in vain. You will have entertained us.
One of television’s great contributions is that it brought murder back into the home, where it belongs.
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.
I suppose if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I would have gotten away with it. I’m sorry I opened my mouth. I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ, or anti-religion. I wasn’t knocking it or putting it down. I was just saying it as a fact and it’s true more for England than here. I’m not saying that we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a person or God as a thing or whatever it is. I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was taken wrong. And now it’s all this.
