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Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.

The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.

In a mass television democracy - which all of us nowadays have - it is impossible to take basic political decisions with long-term consequences without the public knowing it, without the public understanding at least some of it, without the public forming its judgment, heterogeneous as it may be.

While television is a good servant, it's a bad master. It can swallow up huge quantities of our lives without much happiness bang for the buck.

Television is just one more facet of that considerable segment of our society that never had any standard but the soft buck.

Television doesn't like politics very well, if you can infer that from the way they cover it.

There is something supremely reassuring about television; the worst is always yet to come.

Television has become the government, priest, psychotherapist - the legitimiser of our egos.

Politics is show business for ugly people.