Welcome to Cable Quotes, your ultimate destination for insightful and thought-provoking quotes related to cable television and the ever-evolving media landscape. As our world becomes increasingly interconnected through technology, cable television remains a pivotal aspect of our entertainment consumption, offering a diverse array of programming that captivates audiences worldwide. Whether it’s groundbreaking series, compelling documentaries, or live events, cable television continues to shape our cultural discourse and provide a window into the myriad narratives that define our society.
At Cable Quotes, we curate a collection of quotes that reflect the dynamic nature of the cable television industry, capturing the perspectives of industry leaders, content creators, and influential figures who have left an indelible mark on the medium. From insightful commentary on the power of storytelling to reflections on the impact of cable television on our collective consciousness, our selection of quotes offers a glimpse into the multifaceted world of cable entertainment. Explore the words of visionaries who have shaped the landscape of television, and delve into the nuances of this ever-evolving medium through the lens of their wisdom.
‘The Sopranos,’ for instance, is arguably the best cable show of all time. They could have made a movie, but that show ended so perfectly, it would almost be a disadvantage to make a movie like that. Then again, if you made a ‘Sopranos’ movie, people would be lined around the block to go see it. Jerry Ferrara
Cable news is force-feeding you an endless back and forth of pundits who consistently get everything wrong, while at the same time, they mask their opinions as facts and argue about the endless minutia of a broken Washington, D.C., instead of arming you with real knowledge and new ideas. Dave Rubin
Everybody’s got cable. Lewis Black
My unique contribution to the fitness industry is bringing fitness into the home through cable, VHS, DVD and now digital formats. Denise Austin
Everything is relative. Is the Internet fast? Not for most people. Is it always on? Yes, for cable modem and DSL users but that represents a tiny percentage of users. John Patrick
Because it’s uncensored cable, I think we’ll be able to do the kind of sketch comedy that really hasn’t been seen before. We can actually finish jokes. Aries Spears
With drama, especially, it seems like the bigger the budgets and the edgier the characters, the more interesting they are. We’re very lucky because ‘Modern Family’ wouldn’t fit on cable: they’d want us to push it more and be edgier and turn it into something that it’s not. Steven Levitan
When the kids were growing up, we didn’t have a television in the house connected to a cable or an antenna. If something bad happened in the world, I wanted the kids to hear about it from me. Bob Goff
A father and two sons run Adelphia. It’s a cable company. And they took from that company a billion dollars. A billion. Three people – three people took a billion dollars. What were they gonna do, start their own space program? ‘Let’s send the monkey to Mars, Dad!’ Lewis Black
When I’m about ready to press the cable release on the View camera, I’ve tried to anticipate some of the challenges I’m going to encounter in the darkroom. John Sexton
I can tell you from personal experience it gets a little tiring having to make the rounds on cable shows to explain ‘what’s up with black folks.’ John Ridley
Magazines that depend on photography, and design, and long reads, and quality stuff, are going to do just fine despite the Internet and cable news. Jann Wenner
I’m doing 5000 seat theaters and audiences are going nuts, it’s fantastic and it makes me very happy. I’m dirty, but not like this; I just do comedy that I find funny. I’m working on a new tv show for cable and it’s not set up yet. Bob Saget
We now assume that when people turn on the evening news, they basically already know what the news is. They’ve heard it on the radio. They’ve seen it on the Internet. They’ve seen it on one of the cable companies. So that makes our job a bit different. Bob Schieffer
I’ve always liked adventure television. Pre-‘Survivor,’ I did a series on cable called ‘Eco-Challenge,’ an adventure race with experts mainly, and here we have ‘Expedition Impossible.’ I like the outdoors and I like doing something fresh for television you haven’t seen before. Mark Burnett
For a lot of people, most of their exposure to politics and politicians involves events on the campaign trail, interviews on cable news, or seeing a viral tweet here or there. But day to day, there’s so much more than anyone sees. John Fetterman
Rarely, if ever, has a cable news channel employed a host who has previously campaigned for the business goals of the channel’s parent company. But as channels like MSNBC have moved to more opinionated formats, they have exposed themselves to potential conflicts. Brian Stelter
When you go to cable, there are no stations and no affiliates and they allow you to do your show. George Lopez
Conservatives, despite their increasingly powerful presence on cable TV and talk radio, feel excluded and disregarded by the longstanding preponderance of liberal voices on public television. Michael Medved
Many of our constituents have one option for cable TV and one price. Our constituents desire choice. Melissa Bean
Cable has come along; many all-news 24 hour cable outlets in the United States. They have cut deeply into the traditional networks’ viewing audience. Walter Cronkite
Whenever I catch a chunk of an Adam Sandler comedy on cable, it looks as badly shot and goofily tossed off as a Jerry Lewis gag reel once he hit the late downslide with ‘Hardly Working’ and ‘Cracking Up.’ James Wolcott
I think probably one of the coolest things was when I went to play basketball at Rucker Park in Harlem. First of all, who would think that Larry the Cable Guy would go to Harlem to play basketball? And I was received like a rock star. It was amazing! There were people everywhere. There were guys walking by yelling, ‘Git ‘r done!’ Larry the Cable Guy
Look at the Chandra Levy case. It’s become a Star Chamber. The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it. Ray Bradbury
Habit is a cable; we weave a thread of it each day, and at last we cannot break it. Horace Mann
Most Americans don’t think about antitrust law when they look at their cable bill, flip channels on TV, or worry about what their favorite website knows about them. But they should. Al Franken
I watch sports and cable news. I’m a political junkie, so that’s my interest. Jerry Springer
I was a home-schooled kid, living in the forest, and I didn’t even have cable. I’m serious. Kat Dennings
Prior to ‘The Shield,’ basic cable was just a wasteland of reruns and NASCAR. When we came along, I think there was a collective, ‘Hey, if they can do that, why can’t we?’ from the basic-cable networks of the world. We ended up being the cornerstone for a network, and a great one. Michael Chiklis
The stories about broadcast dying or it being overtaken by cable have stopped. Same goes for the stories about the Internet hurting our business. Leslie Moonves
Cable would not translate into the public radio universe. Juan Williams
All three networks have always had a morning show but now cable of course is taking some of that audience away and a variety of other things, probably the Internet as well. Katie Couric
If I could make a device where people could just intuit everything you are thinking – a little cable you plug into, like, a USB port, I would make a billion dollars. Mindy Kaling
I act probably a lot more than you see. I happen to choose movies that don’t have much of a life, or I choose movies that are shown on cable instead of as features. Holly Hunter
I grew up on a farm, and we didn’t have cable and only limited radio stations, so I wasn’t inundated with culture the way people in other parts of the country were. But I was really interested in it. Chuck Klosterman
It’s definitely the highest rated pre-school show on Cable. It’s difficult to mix markets that way in terms of ratings. It’s hard to tell, you know, where channel 12, or Public Television, is. Steve Burns
Cable boxes are, almost without exception, awful. They’re under-powered computers running very badly designed software. Their channel guides are slow, poorly laid out, and usually riddled with ads. Alex Pareene
The perfect date for me would be staying at home, making a big picnic in bed, eating Wotsits and cookies while watching cable TV. Kim Kardashian
Technology gives us the facilities that lessen the barriers of time and distance – the telegraph and cable, the telephone, radio, and the rest. Emily Greene Balch
The cable law. Prasar Bharati. The Broadcasting Bill. These are all overlapping things. Sushma Swaraj
Back in the late ’90s, I put together a humorous newsmagazine program called ‘The Awful Truth’ for Bravo. We helped one guy get an organ transplant whose insurance company had refused to pay. I thought, if we could save a guy’s life in a 10-minute segment on cable, what could we do if we devoted a whole movie to a whole bunch of people? Michael Moore
I’m not really sure what I’d like to see people doing more of online, but what I’d like to see less of is the warning signs that not ratifying net neutrality is gonna cause two separate nets: one that the big dogs can afford to be on and the other a ghetto internet that no one goes on. Think FM vs AM radio, or cable vs broadcast TV. Drew Curtis
I’ve had enough of the blowhards on cable TV and the self-righteous anger I hear from people whose only accomplishment in life is their ability to turn the dial on an AM radio. James Carville
I grew up in New York City in the ’80s, and it was the epicenter of hip-hop. There was no Internet. Cable television wasn’t as broad. I would listen to the radio, hear cars pass by playing a song, or tape songs off of the radio. At that time, there was such an excitement around hip-hop music. Michael Rapaport
The failure of The Cable Guy impacted my career. I had to start writing and acting again. Ben Stiller
I think a lot of people in television news look at the cable networks with great envy. Chris Wallace
I grew up in Toronto and as long as I can remember, as long as there was cable, even those old cable boxes that were wired to the TV, there have been Bollywood movies on Toronto TV. Mike Myers
There has been an attempt to pull in a more cable mentality to the big networks – from NBC hiring Scott Sassa from TNT, to FOX hiring Herzog from Comedy Central. Sam Seder
I have no problem at all going back and forth between cable and network. Shawn Ryan
I got a cable from New York saying that what I’d written about the growth of Soviet agricultural production didn’t make sense because the same levels were reached under the czars. I wanted to confirm it, but by then the censors were on to me. Harrison Salisbury
My father lost an eye to a snapped cable while trying to rescue trapped miners, though he kept on working for fifteen years afterward. Homer Hickam
The cable model is just a better model. Dual revenue stream: advertising-supported and subscription-supported revenues. Jeff Zucker
Cable penetrates 70 percent of American audiences now. Tom Brokaw
Where I grew up, we had the three TV networks, maybe two radio stations, no cable TV. We still had a long-distance party line in our neighborhood, so you could listen to all your neighbors’ phone calls. We had a very small public library, and the nearest bookstore was an hour away. Marc Andreessen
Wet Hot American Summer so far is a financial disappointment and money was lost on it. But perhaps it will find its audience in video, cable, etc, maybe over the course of years. David Wain
Television is better than it’s ever been in history. A lot of stories are being pushed – because of how complicated they are to make – toward Netflix and other channels on cable. Leonardo DiCaprio
I know enough to know every time a cable show beats a broadcast show… you’ve attracted people outside the scope of what you normally reach. Harris Faulkner
We had more viewers on the broadcast network than we did on the cable channel. Brit Hume
We’ve got to lift our game tremendously. We’ll sell our business news and information in print, we’ll sell it to anyone who’s got a cable system, and we’ll sell it on the Web. Rupert Murdoch
‘Banshee’ was interesting because it was on cable, and it didn’t have commercial breaks, so it read like a movie. Not only because of that, but it was a pretty interesting style, and I hadn’t read a show like this. Trieste Kelly Dunn
Each day more coalition MPs in seats outside the South East come out against George Osborne’s regional pay cut plans, and Vince Cable now claims they are dead. Frances O’Grady
The hardware manufacturers, game designers, cable companies and computer companies and, in fact, film studios are going to ensure that this thing marches on. They know that they are going to make an enormous amount of money from it. Thomas Dolby
Our legislation addresses broadcasts over the public airwaves, but I hope the cable and satellite industries see the importance of this issue and voluntarily create a family tier of programming and offer culturally responsible products. Charles W. Pickering
I am working as a co-host on a show called, ‘Lifetime Live.’ It’s on the Lifetime cable network. My co-host is Deborah Roberts. She’s a news correspondent with 20/20. We are billed as a news and information show. It’s fun. Dana Reeve
Broadcasting for advertisers is still the best game in town, and they know it. Look, I admire a lot of the shows on cable. I think ‘Mad Men’ is wonderful. I think ‘Breaking Bad’ is wonderful. But let’s remember they’re about one-tenth the audience of NCIS. Leslie Moonves
A lot of cable television is shot on a single camera. Our eyes are more trained to that. It takes the camera off the crane, away from observing the action, to becoming a character in the story along with everyone else. People are getting used to that. A. J. Bowen
I graduated from high school in 1963. There were no computers, cell phones, Internet, credit cards, cassette tapes or cable TV. Jeffrey Gitomer
The major networks, the cable networks, they’re being prosecutors. They’re judges and jurors and executioners. Well, c’mon, that’s ridiculous. But they’re doing it. Ray Bradbury
Just about any story we think about doing, whether we’ve read it in a newspaper, heard it on the radio or come upon it through word of mouth – by the time you get there, every other network, cable station and talk show is already racing to the scene. Connie Chung
I had a 2-week courtship with a fellow student in the fiction workshop in Iowa and a 5-minute wedding in a lawyer’s office above the coffee shop where we’d been having lunch that day. And so I sent a cable to my father saying, ‘By the time you get this, Daddy, I’ll already be Mrs. Blaise!’ Bharati Mukherjee
We try to make the name longer and longer every year. First, it was ‘Larry the Cable Guy’s Christmas Spectacular.’ Then it was ‘It’s a Very Larry Christmas.’ Now it’s ‘Larry the Cable Guy’s Hula-palooza Christmas Luau.’ I’ll tell you what it is: It’s funny. That’s what it is. Who cares what the name of it is? It is a funny special. Larry the Cable Guy
I’m officially near-famous. If you’ve got four year old kids and you’ve got cable, then you’ve got no choice but to know who I am. But if you’re one of my peers – a 26-year old guy who lives in Manhattan – you have no idea who I am. I’m only famous if you’re four. Steve Burns
One way to get high speed to the home is over cable systems. Jon Postel
FDR once said he was like a cat, that he would pounce and then relax. That’s much harder to do in the 24-hour cable world, because it’s almost like the press demands of you to be saying something or doing something every day. Doris Kearns Goodwin
In 1984 nobody knew what cable was going to be. It was there, but you didn’t know where it was going. Curtis Armstrong
For an Italian peasant a telegram from anywhere is a wondrous thing; and a cable from the terrestrial paradise of America is not lightly to be disregarded. Howard K. Smith
No cord or cable can draw so forcibly, or bind so fast, as love can do with a single thread. Robert Burton
I made a lot of money. I earned a lot of money with CNN and satellite and cable television. And you can’t really spend large sums of money, intelligently, on buying things. So I thought the best thing I could do was put some of that money back to work – making an investment in the future of humanity. Ted Turner
Getting trapped back in the ’80s, it’s almost like a comic nightmare, which for me is a very real nightmare. Every time I flip through the cable, I have flashbacks. John Cusack
I went door-to-door selling cable television subscriptions when I was in college. Not to date myself, but cable was just coming on. I had terrible territories, and they would give me $25, if I got somebody to let them come and just put the little cord in their house. Greg Kinnear
To be honest, Im a really bad Gen Zer, because I didnt get Netflix or any streaming services until the pandemic. I was always a die hard cable person. Renee Rapp
Obviously sex and nudity sells, but that’s what people go to cable for but that’s not going to happen on network daytime television… so I think it really is always going to come down to story. How do you make a story interesting enough so people will tune in? That’s always going to be it. Jack Wagner
It’s not like Alaska isn’t wilderness – it mostly is. But most Alaskans don’t live in the wild. They live on the edge of the wild in towns with schools and cable TV and stores and dentists and roller rinks sometimes. It’s just like anyplace else, only with mountains and moose. Tom Bodett
I know I’m on a small cable reality show. I’m realistic where I stand in the scheme of things. Jai Rodriguez
Robert Osborne either has the best job in the world, or comes very close. As millions of viewers know, Osborne is the resident host of the great Turner Classic Movies (TCM) channel, the most reliable source of pure enchantment in the cable universe. Tom Shales
There was no way to focus on the movement of the cable. If I looked down at the cable there was water moving everywhere. And if I looked up there was heavy mist blowing in front of my face. So it was a very unique, a weird sensation. Nik Wallenda
The Fox News cable channel is doing very well because there is a market for what Fox News has to offer. Paul Weyrich
We were probably the last people in the country to get a VCR and we didn’t have cable. There wasn’t any admiration of glamour, no, ‘I want to look like them or have that lifestyle’, because everyone in my town had the same lifestyle. So I didn’t think, ‘Ooh, a movie star’s birthday!’ I just thought, ‘What?’ Christina Hendricks
I’ve worked in network and cable on and off for a number of years, and you just understand what your parameters are. A lot of times, I think the best work that my team has come up with comes from having to deal with certain boundaries. Shawn Ryan
This generation is so dead. You ask a kid, ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ and they’ll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, ‘Man, I’m really into remote-controlled steamboats.’ Jack White
‘Network neutrality’ is sometimes called ‘Internet freedom’ or ‘Internet openness’ and is a legal principle that would forbid cable and phone companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Comcast from blocking some websites or providing special priority to others. Marvin Ammori
I think cable has been under-appreciated for its contribution to society. Brian L. Roberts
It’s very difficult to break into motion pictures, but it’s oddly easier for directors today because of independent films and cable, who have inherited for the most part those films of substance that the studios are reluctant to finance. Mark Rydell
I think that cable TV is a great venue to do something interesting. Bob Odenkirk
We did some soul-searching. Was the cable industry obsolete? Was it an opportune time to get out? Our conclusion was that if you rebuilt your system with this new fiber-optic coaxial hybrid – which we now call broadband – the glass was half full, not half empty. We could compete. Brian L. Roberts
Obviously with the onset of cable and satellite, there are more opportunities for programming and original programming, so it creates more opportunities for actors and producers and directors and everything. Anthony Michael Hall
And I was asked if I would come and help with the recovery of this great British company, Cable and Wireless, and I’m delighted to become part of the new and very talented management that have been brought in to that company as well. Lord Robertson
The five million people who watch cable news are the political nation, the people who really care. David Frum
For a man who purports to have learned of media ethics only this month, Mr. Williams has spent an undue amount of time appearing as a media ethicist on both CNN and the cable news networks of NBC. Frank Rich
Living in a community with very wounded people, I came to see that I had lived most of my life as a tightrope artist trying to walk on a high, thin cable from one tower to the other, always waiting for the applause when I had not fallen off and broken my leg. Henri Nouwen
