Famous quotes containing the words science, fiction and/or television:
“For twenty-five centuries, Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world. It has failed to understand that the world is not for the beholding. It is for hearing. It is not legible, but audible. Our science has always desired to monitor, measure, abstract, and castrate meaning, forgetting that life is full of noise and that death alone is silent: work noise, noise of man, and noise of beast. Noise bought, sold, or prohibited. Nothing essential happens in the absence of noise.”
—Jacques Attali (b. 1943)
“Americans will listen, but they do not care to read. War and Peace must wait for the leisure of retirement, which never really comes: meanwhile it helps to furnish the living room. Blockbusting fiction is bought as furniture. Unread, it maintains its value. Read, it looks like money wasted. Cunningly, Americans know that books contain a person, and they want the person, not the book.”
—Anthony Burgess (b. 1917)
“We cannot spare our children the influence of harmful values by turning off the television any more than we can keep them home forever or revamp the world before they get there. Merely keeping them in the dark is no protection and, in fact, can make them vulnerable and immature.”
—Polly Berrien Berends (20th century)