“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.”

“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)”

“No matter how grim things may seem, they always get better.”

“[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)”

“It's always like a miracle. No matter how bad everything was on ordinary days, no matter how poor they seemed, on Yontev -- like on Shabbos -- they suddenly seemed rich.”

“Every heart has a hidden treasure. A secret wish. A silent dream. A special goal to long for. No matter how distant it may seem.”