“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)”

“For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.”

“Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?”

“After all, television is confined to a glass box. No matter how gruesome the scenes on the screen may be, no blood will spill on the carpet. No matter how close television seems to be bring the day's events, they always remain distant enough to be viewed with dispassion. The global village can be visited and abandoned at will.”

“[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)”

“Increasingly we live in a world of concrete, tarmac, television, and computer screens. These are great mechanical and electronic constructs of the human intellect--but they blot out our view of the rising and setting sun and keep our feet from being grounded in the earth, which in many cultures is a sacred act of communion”