92 Iconic Television Show Quotes

Television has a unique way of leaving a lasting impact on our lives, often resonating through unforgettable quotes that echo long after the screen has faded to black. Whether it's the witty banter of our favorite sitcom characters, the profound reflections from dramatic series, or the punchy one-liners from beloved animated shows, TV quotes have transcended their original contexts to become a part of our everyday language. In this collection, we delve into 92 of the most iconic television show quotes that have stood the test of time, capturing the essence of each show and leaving an indelible mark on pop culture. Get ready to revisit these memorable moments and perhaps find a new favorite to add to your repertoire.

1. “People love a happy ending. So every episode, I will explain once again that I don't like people. And then Mal will shoot someone. Someone we like. And their puppy.” - Joss Whedon

2. “I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.” - Groucho Marx

3. “So please, oh please, we beg, we pray,Go throw your TV set away,And in its place you can installA lovely bookshelf on the wall.Then fill the shelves with lots of books.” - Roald Dahl

4. “Hoy no salir en televisión es un signo de elegancia.” - Umberto Eco

5. “It's been suggested that if the super-naturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science. Either way, why are they wasting their talents doing party turns on television?By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.” - Richard Dawkins

6. “Every day's a negotiation and sometimes it's done with guns.” - Joss Whedon

7. “Seeing a murder on television... can help work off one's antagonisms. And if you haven't any antagonisms, the commercials will give you some.” - Alfred Hitchcock

8. “...and he just sat back and stared at the tube, almost interested in what was happening, trying to find the ability to believe in that lie so he could believe the one within.” - Hubert Selby Jr.

9. “Anyone who watches even the slightest amount of TV is familiar with the scene: An agent knocks on the door of some seemingly ordinary home or office. The door opens, and the person holding the knob is asked to identify himself. The agent then says, "I'm going to ask you to come with me.” - David Sedaris

10. “There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. It is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is; a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its own message.” - Jean Baudrillard

11. “Do you know we are being led toSlaughters by placid admirals& that fat slow generals are gettingObscene on young bloodDo you know we are ruled by t.v.” - Jim Morrison

12. “If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.” - Edward R. Murrow

13. “We are in the same tent as the clowns and the freaks-that's show business.” - Edward R. Murrow

14. “If you believe that your thoughts originate inside your brain, do you also believe that television shows are made inside your television set?” - Warren Ellis

15. “An intellectual snob is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture and not think of The Lone Ranger. ” - Dan Rather

16. “Television characters live inside our minds as though they're actual people. In fact, we know more about them than we do about most people in our physical lives.” - Neal Pollack

17. “Reading, for me, is like this: consumptive, pleasing, calming, as much as edifying. It's how I feel after a good dinner. That's why I do it so often: It feels wonderful. The book is mind and I insert myself into it, cover it entire, ear my way through every last slash and dot. That's something you can do with a book, unlike television or movies or the Internet. You can eat it, or mark it, like a dog does on a hydrant. ” - Tara Bray Smith

18. “What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish.” - W. H. Auden

19. “I was about 12 years old and I was sitting watching the television and it was some kind of talent show, you know, and on marches this monkey, this ape, in a pair of red-checked trousers with a little matching jacket holding a ukelele and it started jigging around playing it, and it was looking straight into the camera, straight at me, and I remember thinking, that's it, that'll be me, you know, that'll be me.” - Nick Cave

20. “Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.” - Bill Hicks

21. “Kill your television!” - Paul Thomas Anderson

22. “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. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.” - Raymond Chandler

23. “You cannot blame porn. When I was young, I used to masturbate to Gilligan's Island.” - Ron Jeremy

24. “For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.” - Jonathan Lethem

25. “But though it had prevailed against such fierce adversaries as fire and flood, it had fallen victim softly and swiftly to television in the 1960's.” - Kate Morton

26. “I’ve noticed that you are retarded, Dr. Phil.” - Christy Leigh Stewart

27. “On Friday night, I was reading my new book, but my brain got tired, so I decided to watch some television instead.” - Stephen Chbosky

28. “Wenn ich alleine fernsehe, habe ich meine eigenen Regeln und schalte nur ab, nachdem etwas Gutes passiert ist, oder so, dass die letzten Worte, die man hört, einen nicht verletzen. Man will doch nicht abschalten, wenn zwei Leute mitten im Streit sind oder wenn jemand gerade 'Schwein' sagt oder 'Tod' oder 'Mein Auto ist verreckt'.” - Victor Lodato

29. “I haven't had a TV in 10 years, and I really don't miss it. 'Cause it's always so much more fun to be with people than it ever was to be with a television.” - Chuck Palahniuk

30. “Hey, Geekoid!" yelled Duncan Dougal, "Why do you read so much? Don't you know how to watch TV?” - Bruce Coville

31. “Television is the soma of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World.” - Robert MacNeil

32. “I don't think playing it safe constitutes a retreat, necessarily. In other words, I don't think if, by playing safe he means we are not going to delve into controversy, then if that's what he means he's quite right. I'm not going to delve into controversy. Somebody asked me the other day if this means that I'm going to be a meek conformist, and my answer is no. I'm just acting the role of a tired non-conformist.” - Rod Serling

33. “Television screens saturated with commercials promote the utopian and childish idea that all problems have fast, simple, and technological solutions. You must banish from your mind the naive but commonplace notion that commercials are about products. They are about products in the same sense that the story of Jonah is about the anatomy of whales. ” - Neil Postman

34. “Audiences see personalities on shows interacting with wild animals as if they were not dangerous or, at the other extreme, provoking them to give viewers an adrenaline rush. Mostly, the animals just want to be left alone, so it’s not surprising that these entertainers are seriously hurt or even killed on rare occasions. On one level, it’s that very possibility the shows are selling.” - Chris Palmer

35. “Most people gaze neither into the past nor the future; they explore neither truth nor lies. They gaze at the television.” - Radiohead

36. “If TV were only an invention to broadcast soccer, it would be justified.” - Roberto Fontanarrosa

37. “Calvin:"It says here that 'religion is the opiate of the masses.'...what do you suppose that means?"Television: "...it means that Karl Marx hadn't seen anything yet” - Bill Watterson

38. “TV sounds are all the same; there's no difference between the sound of the wind in Northern Ireland and the wind on a Polynesian island.” - Ryu Murakami

39. “Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD.” - Jeff Lindsay

40. “La televisión es el Anticristo y le digo yo que bastarán tres o cuatro generaciones para que la gente ya no sepa ni tirarse pedos por su cuenta y el ser humano vuelva a la caverna, a la barbarie medieval, y a estados de imbecilidad que ya superó la babosa allá por el pleistoceno. Este mundo no se morirá de una bomba atómica como dicen en los diarios, se morirá de risa, de banalidad, haciendo un chiste de todo, y además un chiste malo.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

41. “I had to start watching [The Real Housewives of New Jersey] every week because, well, my IQ was just too high. I mean seriously up there. What can I tell you? After watching every episode, I am now officially as dumb as that brown, particle-like stuff you find outside and don't want to track inside the house. Rhymes with "wirt", I think.” - Celia Rivenbark

42. “That day, I started taking an interest in the bar's television. We always kept it on. As the hours slid by in a cacophony of talk I kept watch, throwing in the occasional comment about politicians, bankers, show biz personalities as they appeared on screen. I wasn't being nosy, you understand. Just human.” - Jonathan Gash

43. “Reading requires actual concentration. If you skipped a paragraph, or even an important sentence, you could lose the entire story. With most TV shows, though, you didn't have to concentrate at all. You could space out for a good ten minutes, then come back and still figure out what was going on.” - Daniel Ehrenhaft

44. “In honor of Oprah Winfrey: Even greater than the ability to inspire others with hope is the power to motivate them to give as much to the lives of others as they would give to their own; and to empower them to confront the worst in themselves in order to discover and claim the best in themselves.” - Aberjhani

45. “We must, together as a nation, stop watching Fox.” - Jon Steward

46. “The sky was thick with TV. If you wore special glasses you could see them spinning through the sky among the bats and homing birds—blondes, wars, famines, football, food shows, coups d'état, hairstyles stiff with hair spray. Designer pectorals. Gliding towards Ayemenem like skydivers. Making patterns in the sky. Wheels. Windmills. Flowers blooming and unblooming.” - Arundhati Roy

47. “We have become a more juvenile culture. We have become a childish "me, me, me" culture with fifteen-second attention spans. The global village that television was supposed to bring is less a village than a playground...Little attempt is made to pass on our cultural inheritance, and our moral and religious traditions are neglected except in the shallow "family values" arguments.” - Wes Jackson

48. “أعتقد أن التليفزيون وسيلة ثقافية هامة للغاية .. كلما وجدت شخصاً يقوم بتشغيله، أذهب إلى غرفة أخرى لقراءة كتاب” - Groucho Marx

49. “I feel guilty because for a long time I didn't allow myself a television, and I used to drop that fact in conversation to impress people. I thought it made me sound dignified. A couple of years ago, however, I visited a church in the suburbs and there was this blowhard preacher talking about how television rots your brain. He said that when we are watching television our minds are working no harder than when we are sleeping. I thought that sounded heavenly. I bought one that afternoon.” - Donald Miller

50. “There are different ways people make this place. Sweat, exercise and pain is one way. You can see them in the gyms, in the well-ordered swimming pools. You can see them jogging in the small, worn parks. Another way to make your place is TV. A bright, brash place, always well lit, full of fun and jokes that tell you when to laugh so you never miss them. World news carefully edited so that it’s not too disturbing, but disturbing enough to make you glad that you weren’t born in a foreign country. News with music to tell you who to hate, who to feel sorry for, and who laugh at.” - David Mitchell

51. “How can even the idea of rebellion against corporate culture stay meaningful when Chrysler Inc. advertises trucks by invoking “The Dodge Rebellion”? How is one to be bona fide iconoclast when Burger King sells onion rings with “Sometimes You Gotta Break the Rules”? How can an Image-Fiction writer hope to make people more critical of televisual culture by parodying television as a self-serving commercial enterprise when Pepsi and Subaru and FedEx parodies of self-serving commercials are already doing big business? It’s almost a history lesson: I’m starting to see just why turn-of-the-century Americans’ biggest fear was of anarchist and anarchy. For if anarchy actually wins, if rulelessness become the rule, then protest and change become not just impossible but incoherent. It’d be like casting a ballot for Stalin: you are voting for an end to all voting.” - David Foster Wallace

52. “We're all watching each other, so there's no chance for censorship. The main problem is the idiot TV. If you watch local news, your head will turn to mush.” - Ray Bradbury

53. “People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.” - Jess C. Scott

54. “So I ask you: whose job is it in this country to wake up comatose parents? Someone better do it soon because knowing television's potential for harm and keeping that knowledge to ourselves instead of sharing it with parents amounts to covering up a land mine on a busy street.” - Jim Trelease

55. “The President is also captured in a well-worn TV news clip, making a boilerplate response to a question on terrorism and then asking the reporters to watch his drive. Well, that's what you get if you catch the President on a golf course. If Eisenhower had done this, as he often did, it would have been presented as calm statesmanship. If Clinton had done it, as he often did, it would have shown his charm.” - Christopher Hitchens

56. “5. Television is of great educational value. It teaches you while still really young how to (a) kill, (b) rob, (c) embezzle, (d) shoot, (e) poison, and generally speaking, (f) how to grow up into a Wild West outlaw or gangster by the time you leave school.6. Television puts a stop to crime because all the burglars and robbers, instead of going to burgle and rob, sit at home watching The Lone Ranger, Emergency Ward Ten and Dotto.” - George Mikes

57. “I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.” - Stephen King

58. “Americans no longer talk to each other, they entertain each other. They do not exchange ideas, they exchange images. They do not argue with propositions; they argue with good looks, celebrities and commercials.” - Neil Postman

59. “The problem with our society is that our values aren’t in the right place. There’s an awful lot of bleeding and naked bodies on prime-time networks, but not nearly enough cable television on public programming.” - Bauvard

60. “When I was your age I knew how to listen to television and learn a few things.” - Lewis Nordan

61. “You know, you spend your childhood watching TV, assuming that at some point in the future everything you see will one day happen to you: that you too will win a Formula One race, hop a train, foil a group of terrorists, tell someone 'Give me the gun', etc. Then you start secondary school, and suddenly everyone's asking you about your career plans and your long-term goals, and by goals they don't mean the kind you are planning to score in the FA Cup. Gradually the awful truth dawns on you: that Santa Claus was just the tip of the iceberg - that your future will not be the rollercoaster ride you'd imagined,that the world occupied by your parents, the world of washing dishes, going to the dentist, weekend trips to the DIY superstore to buy floor-tiles, is actually largely what people mean when they speak of 'life'.” - Paul Murray

62. “Millie? Does the White Clown love you?” - Ray Bradbury

63. “The amount of educational programming on television today is simply desensitizing. The only reason left to go to school is to see gun violence.” - Bauvard

64. “Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.” - Chuck Palahniuk

65. “To paraphrase Muggeridge: Everything is a parable that God is speaking to us, the art of life is to get the message.” - Chester Elijiah Branch

66. “If you are mesmerized by televised stupidity, and don't get to hear or read stories about your world, you can be fooled into thinking that the world isn't miraculous--and it is.” - Anne Lamott

67. “The television commercial has mounted the most serious assault on capitalist ideology since the publication of Das Kapital. To understand why, we must remind ourselves that capitalism, like science and liberal democracy, was an outgrowth of the Enlightenment. Its principal theorists, even its most prosperous practitioners, believed capitalism to be based on the idea that both buyer and seller are sufficiently mature, well informed and reasonable to engage in transactions of mutual self-interest. If greed was taken to be the fuel of the capitalist engine, the surely rationality was the driver. The theory states, in part, that competition in the marketplace requires that the buyer not only knows what is good for him but also what is good. If the seller produces nothing of value, as determined by a rational marketplace, then he loses out. It is the assumption of rationality among buyers that spurs competitors to become winners, and winners to keep on winning. Where it is assumed that a buyer is unable to make rational decisions, laws are passed to invalidate transactions, as, for example, those which prohibit children from making contracts...Of course, the practice of capitalism has its contradictions...But television commercials make hash of it...By substituting images for claims, the pictorial commercial made emotional appeal, not tests of truth, the basis of consumer decisions. The distance between rationality and advertising is now so wide that it is difficult to remember that there once existed a connection between them. Today, on television commercials, propositions are as scarce as unattractive people. The truth or falsity of an advertiser's claim is simply not an issue. A McDonald's commercial, for example, is not a series of testable, logically ordered assertions. It is a drama--a mythology, if you will--of handsome people selling, buying and eating hamburgers, and being driven to near ecstasy by their good fortune. No claim are made, except those the viewer projects onto or infers from the drama. One can like or dislike a television commercial, of course. But one cannot refute it.” - Neil Postman

68. “By eroding their sense of shame we've made immorality normal, not only in the world but also in the forbidden squadron. ...their new Christian friends recommended some of the movies Fletcher had been wondering if he should now avoid. I was delighted one of them said, "This is a great movie--only one sex scene, and the f-word's only used a few times." 'Titanic' is one of my favorites. How many Christian young people have watched it in their own homes? Think of it, Squaltaint. Suppose someone in the youth group said to the boys, 'There's an attractive girl down the street. Let's get together and go look through her window and watch her undress and lay back on a couch and pose naked from the waist up. Then this girl and her boyfriend will get in a car and have sex--let's get as close as we can and listen to them and watch the windows steam up.' The strategy would never work. They'd know immediately it was wrong. But you can get them to do exactly the same thing by using a television instead of a window. That's all is takes! Think of it, Squaltaint. Every day Christians across the country, including many squadron leaders, watch women and men undress and commit acts of fornication and adultery the Enemy calls an abomination.We've made them a bunch of voyeurs! Churches full of peeping toms.” - Randy Alcorn

69. “Get your associates as fast as you can and then get a bachelors.""I don't want that. I want to work in TV.""Trust me, Laura. You'd be happier if you were an accountant.” - Teresa Lo

70. “Television, my dear Daniel, is the Antichrist, and I can assure you that after only three or four generations, people will no longer even know how to fart on their own. Humans will return to living in caves, to medieval savagery, and to the general state of imbecility that slugs overcame back in the Pleistocene era. Our world will not die as a result of the bomb, as the papers say - it will die of laughter, of banality, of making a joke of everything, and a lousy joke at that.” - Carlos Ruiz Zafon

71. “It seems to me that television is exactly like a gun. Your enjoyment of it is determined by which end of it you're on.” - Alfred Hitchcock

72. “Every hour of television that a person watches after the age of twenty-five, the researchers concluded, potentially snips twenty-two minutes off of the viewer's life span.” - Gretchen Reynolds

73. “Es cierto que la televisión, a diferencia de los instrumentos de comunicación que la han precedido (hasta la radio), destruye más saber y más entendimiento del que transmite.” - Giovanni Sartori

74. “El problema es que el niño es una esponja que registra y absorbe indiscriminadamente todo lo que ve [...] El niño formado en la imagen se reduce a ser un hombre que no lee, y, por lo tanto, la mayoría de las veces, es un ser «reblandecido por la televisión», adicto de por vida a los videojuegos.” - Giovanni Sartori

75. “La televisión produce imágenes y anula los conceptos, y de este modo atrofia nuestra capacidad de abstracción y con ella toda nuestra capacidad de entender.” - Giovanni Sartori

76. “Then why have you been talking about her for the past half hour straight?" His friend glanced over at him, a cheeky grin on his face, and the rockstar glared exaggeratedly."I have not.""You definitely have. I missed an entire episode of Cupcake Wars because you've got a crush.” - Andrea D. Smith

77. “Stop listening to the TV tell you about America the beautiful . . . get up and be America the beautiful.” - Rivera Sun

78. “Y la cuestión es ésta: la televisión invierte la evolución de lo sensible en inteligible y lo convierte en el ictu oculi, en un regreso al puro y simple acto de ver. La televisión produce imágenes y anula los conceptos, y de este modo atrofia nuestra capacidad de abstracción y con ella toda nuestra capacidad de entender.” - Giovanni Sartori

79. “Actualmente el pueblo soberano «opina» sobre todo en función de cómo la televisión le induce a opinar. Y en el hecho de conducir la opinión, el poder de la imagen se coloca en el centro de todos los procesos de la política contemporánea.” - Giovanni Sartori

80. “...la televisión condiciona fuertemente el proceso electoral, ya sea en la elección de los candidatos, bien en su modo de plantear la batalla electoral, o en la forma de ayudar a vencer al vencedor. Además, la televisión condiciona, o puede condicionar, fuertemente el gobierno, es decir, las decisiones del gobierno: lo que un gobierno puede y no puede hacer, o decidir lo que va a hacer.” - Giovanni Sartori

81. “Keisha Blake, whose celebrated will and focus did not leave her much room for angst, watched her friend ascend to the top deck in her new panda-eyed makeup and had a mauvais quart d'heure, wondering whether she herself had any personality at all or was in truth only the accumulation and reflection of all the things she had read in books and seen on television.” - zadie smith

82. “Nuclear weapons and TV have simply intensified the consequences of our tendencies.” - David Foster Wallace

83. “The overwhelming noise we live with has made a fundamental pleasure like sex somehow less exciting, less satisfying, than it was for our libidinous forefathers and mothers. It seems to me that for sex and other pleasures to be enjoyed to the fullest, a certain contemplative quality to life must be present. If you doubt this imagine yourself for a moment having sex. Now imagine you wished to increase the pleasure you were feeling, feel it more intensely. What might you do? Well one of the things you'd probably do is close your eyes. What this does of course is shut out other stimuli. The visual quiet increases your sensual enjoyment and you concentrate more fully on the pleasure. The same is true for the removal of auditory noise as well. Well my feeling is that the average person has a much harder time doing this today than they would have decades ago. Today you close your eyes and shut off Television but the noise persists. It's part of our fabric now, our biology, and all other pleasures including sex are diminished as a result. We don't notice this derogation by the way and sex still feels great, don't get me wrong, but I think the difference is there nonetheless. Like the difference between seeing breasts when you're thirty as opposed to when you were thirteen.” - Sergio De La Pava

84. “Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions.” - Kurt Vonnegut

85. “Confession: I don't want everybody to be beautiful, not in that unlined, creaseless, symmetrical way. Android beauty, like it comes out of a test tube. Beauty without blemish or mark. Not only do I not identify with such people, I don't believe in them either. I don't even find them attractive. This is what makes watching television so hard: they don't cast actors anymore, only models. When they make a movie of my life, they'd better cast a character actor in the lead. Don't try to tell me I'm not a character.” - Lisa Samson

86. “I expect the audience to assume TV is stupid. I accept that it's my job to overcome it.” - Dan Harmon

87. “I was going to dine at the television company’s expense with one of the most beautiful women in show business and some television producer with an inferiority complex. In my experience, there’s always a price.” - V.T. Davy

88. “Texting and phone calls, fireworks, blends, café au lait, and music. Yesterday's television. Work and beer. The neighbor's dog, or those strange flowers, the way it smells at Maisen. Those ordinary things I talk about with you. With you... I want to talk about love with you.” - Tomoko Yamashita

89. “لقد ساءت برامج التليفزيون لدرجة أن الأطفال إنصرقوا إلى المذاكرة” - أنيس منصور

90. “التاريخ يعيد نفسه مرة أو مرتين لكن التليفزيون ألف مرة” - أنيس منصور

91. “Usually I spare myself from the news, because if it’s not propaganda, then it’s one threat or another exaggerated to the point of absurdity, or it’s the tragedy of storm-quake-tsunami, of bigotry and oppression misnamed justice, of hatred passed off as righteousness and honor called dishonorable, all jammed in around advertisements in which a gecko sells insurance, a bear sells toilet tissue, a dog sells cars, a gorilla sells investment advisers, a tiger sells cereal, and an elephant sells a drug that will improve your lung capacity, as if no human being in America any longer believes any other human being, but trusts only the recommendations of animals.” - Dean Koontz

92. “Not only it is annoying, it is distracting from life itself. ~on what TV is.” - R.K. Cowles