“[It] is not that television is entertaining but that it has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience. […] The problem is not that television presents us with entertaining subject matter but that all subject matter is presented as entertaining. (87)”

“But to Lord Peter the world presented itself as an entertaining labyrinth of side-issues”

“The program is only the excuse to get you to watch the advertising. Without the ads there would be no programs. Advertising is the true content of television and if it does not remain so, then advertisers will cease to support the medium, and television will cease to exist as the popular entertainment it presently is.”

“We worship entertainment as much as technology, and there's nothing less entertaining than grief. That's why God invented lorazepam, and selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, and vodka and television - which in my experience work best in combination, with a pizza.”

“Television is our culture's principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore -- and this is the critical point -- how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails. (92)”

“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.”