amusement Quotes

“Form will determine the nature of content.”

“Television does not extend or amplify literate culture. It attacks it.”

“How television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged.”

“Technology is ideology.”

“When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; a culture-death is a clear possibility.”

“TV news has no intention of suggesting that any story has any implications, for that would require viewers to continue to think about it when it is done and therefore obstruct their attending to the next story.”

“Everything in our background has prepared us to know and resist a prison when the gates begin to close around us . . . But what if there are no cries of anguish to be heard? Who is prepared to take arms against a sea of amusements? To whom do we complain, and when, and in what tone of voice, when serious discourse dissolves into giggles? What is the antidote to a culture’s being drained by laughter?”

“There is nothing wrong with entertainment. As some psychiatrist once put it, we all build castles in the air. The problems come when we try to live in them.”

“We are by now well into a second generation of children for whom television has been their first and most accessible teacher and, for many, their most reliable companion and friend.”

“Liberation cannot be accomplished by turning [television] off. Television is for most people the most attractive thing going any time of the day or night. We live in a world in which the vast majority will not turn off. If we don’t get the message from the tube, we get it through other people.”

“Tyrants of all varieties have always known about the value of providing the masses with amusements as a means of pacifying discontent. But most of them could not have even hoped for a situation in which the masses would ignore that which does not amuse.”

“One corner of his mouth lifts in amusement, then pulls back in confusion before coming to rest on indifference.”

“But they did not say the things they knew. And they knew everything. They had seen everything. They had accepted everything. And they received every new intelligence now with a cynical and amused look in their untelling eyes.”

“He watched and recorded their subversive activities with love, amusement, and detachment.”

“Wilson felt the pleasure of amusement. Whoever spoke was wrong, of course - as would be established soon enough when the engine was examined and they checked his wound more closely. Then they’d realize that he’d saved them all.”

″ ‘Look’, Lilly whispered fiercely. ‘Look, everyone. Look what I’ve got!’ Everyone looked. Including Mr. Slinger. He was not amused.”

“All she really wants to do is ride the metro, but finding it shut because of a strike, Zazie looks for other means of amusement.”

The P. O. was a capital little institution, and flourished wonderfully, for nearly as many queer things passed through it as through the real post office. Tragedies and cravats, poetry and pickles, garden seeds and long letters, music and gingerbread, rubbers, invitations, scoldings, and puppies. The old gentleman liked the fun, and amused himself by sending odd bundles, mysterious messages, and funny telegrams, and his gardener, who was smitten with Hannah’s charms, actually sent a love letter to Jo’s care. How they laughed when the secret came out, never dreaming how many love letters that little post office would hold in the years to come.

“People want to be amused, not preached at, you know. Morals don’t sell nowadays.” Which was not quite a correct statement, by the way.