Knowledge in the form of an informational commodity indispensable to productive power is already, and will continue to be, a major -- perhaps the major -- stake in the worldwide competition for power. It is conceivable that the nation-states will one day fight for control of information, just as they battled in the past for control over territory, and afterwards for control over access to and exploitation of raw materials and cheap labor.
--Jean Francois Lyotard (b. 1924), French philosopher.
The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Introduction (1979).
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
--Mitch Ratliffe, Technology Review. April, 1992
"I am amazed at radio DJ's today. I am firmly convinced that AM on my radio stands for Absolute Moron. I will not begin to tell you what FM stands for."
--Jasper Carrott
"There's so much comedy on television. Does that cause comedy in the streets?"
--Dick Cavett
"Television is like the invention of indoor plumbing. It didn't change people's habits. It just kept them inside the house."
--Alfred Hitchcock
"Television is to news as bumperstickers are to philosophy."
--Richard M. Nixon
"Television has lifted the manufacture of banality out of the sphere of handicraft and placed it in that of a major industry."
--Nathalie Sarraute
"The bigger the information media, the less courage and freedom they allow. Bigness means weakness."
--Eric Sevareid
The most puzzling thing about TV is the steady advance of the sponsor across the line that has always separated news from promotion, entertainment from merchandising. The advertiser has assumed the role of originator, and the performer has gradually been eased into the role of peddler.
--E. B. White (1899-1985), U.S. author, editor.
"Split Personalities," in New Yorker.
"I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television."
--Gore Vidal
"Television: Chewing gum for the eyes."
--Frank Lloyd Wright
'Freedom of the press belongs to the man who owns one'.
--A.J. Liebling.
'The corporate grip on opinion in the United States is one of the wonders of the Western World. No First World country has ever managed to eliminate so entirely from its media all objectivity - much less dissent.'--Gore Vidal (b. 1925), U.S. novelist, critic.
A View from the Diners Club, "Cue the Green God, Ted" (1991).
It is a medium of entertainment which permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time, and yet remain lonesome.
--T. S. Eliot (1888-1965), Anglo-American poet, critic.
New York Post.
You have debased [my] child....You have made him a laughingstock of intelligence...a stench in the nostrils of the gods of the ionosphere.
--Dr. Lee De Forest (1873-1961), U.S. inventor of the audion tube.
To National Association of Broadcasters.
"Nothing overshadows truth so completely as authority."
--Alberti
"Common sense is that layer of prejudices which we acquire before we are sixteen."
--Albert Einstein
"People that are really weird can get into sensitive positions and have a tremendous impact on history."
--J. Danforth Quayle