Quotes About Radios

“You do know what I mean about Mom. It's like she radios into headquarters for Dad's feelings when she senses hers need backup.”

— Sara Levine

“I didn't know you were a techie, Mulder.' said Scully ...
'I used to fool around with ham radios when I was a kid,' Mulder said, not looking up from his work.
'Let me guess why,' said Scully. 'Ever succeed in making contact with a spaceship?' ...
'No,' said Mulder. 'But it wasn't from lack of trying.”

— Les Martin

“Jed thought he understood. It was like when his radios were thrown away. You could shrug your shoulders, put on a face that said you didn't care, but you did and nothing could ever be secure again. The next time security appeared as a possibility, you smashed it yourself. And went on smashing it. That, he was sure, was how Creed felt.”

— Rupert Thomson

“I don't like to see all my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers.”

— John Cheever

“The noise of horns and radios and shouted insults was part of the soundtrack of the capital (Hard-boiled P.I. Casta, on Rome, Italy)”

— Tobias Jones

“If we were going to determine what was broken in the radios, we needed a power source. With no electricity, this meant batteries. [ ... ] we'd walk to the trading center and look for used cells that had been tossed in the waste bins. [ ... ]
First we'd test the battery to see if any juice was left in it. We'd attach two wires to the positive and negative ends and connect them to a torch bulb. The brighter the bulb, the stronger the battery. Next we'd flatten the Shake Shake carton and roll it into a tube, then stack the batteries inside, making sure the positives and negatives faced in the same direction. Then we'd run wires from each end of the stack to the positive and negative heads inside the radio, where the batteries normally go. Together, this stack of dead batteries usually contained enough juice to power a radio.”

— William Kamkwamba

“Can either one of you actually fly?"
"Ummm ... define fly."
I heard cursing over the radios.”

— Gini Koch

“ONE OF THE first things the Nazis did was to distribute 100,000 free radio sets to the Austrian Christians. Where did they get these radios? From us, of course. Right after the Anschluss, the Jews were required to turn in their typewriters and their radios, the idea being that if we could not communicate with each other or the outside world, we would be isolated and more easily terrorized and manipulated. It was a good idea. It worked well.”

— Edith Hahn Beer

“When it came to explosives and radios, bad things sometimes happened to good engineers.”

— James Rollins

“God has to remind us this isn't heaven by a long shot, so he increases the radios and lethal flies.”

— Sylvia Plath

“Once, books appealed to a few people, here, there, everywhere. They could afford to be different. The world was roomy. But then the world got full of eyes and elbows and mouths. Double, triple, quadruple the population. Films and radios, magazines, books levelled down to a sort of paste pudding norm, do you follow me?”

— Ray Bradbury

“And in her ears the little Seashells, the thimble radios tamped tight, and an electronic ocean of sound, of music and talk and music and talk coming in, coming in on the shore of her unsleeping mind. The room was indeed empty. Every night the waves came in and bore her off on their great tides of sound, floating her, wide-eyed, toward morning. There had been no night in the last two years that Mildred had not swum that sea, had not gladly gone down in it for the third time.”

— Ray Bradbury

“I don't know. We have everything we need to be happy, but we're not happy. Something's missing. I looked around. The only thing I positively knew was gone was the books I'd burned in ten or twelve years. So I thought books might help."
"You're a hopeless romantic," said Faber. "It would be funny if it were not serious. It's not books you need, it's some of the things that once were in books. The same things could be in the "parlour families" today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected through the radios and televisors, but are not. No, no, it's not books at all you're looking for! Take it where you can find it, in old phonograph records, old motion pictures, and in old friends; look for it in nature and look for it in yourself. Books were only one type of receptacle where we stored a lot of things we were afraid we might forget.”

— Ray Bradbury

“We had no desire to live in Istanbul, nor in Paris or New York. Let them have their discos and dollars, their skycrapers and supersonics transports. Let them have their radios and their color TV, hey, we have ours, don't we? But we have something they don't have. Heart. We have heart. Look, look how the light of life seeps into my very heart”

— Orhan Pamuk

“Outside the windows the cars swept past continuously, out of town, into town, lights ablaze, radios at full throttle. "I wither slowly in thine arms," he read. "Here at the quiet limit of the world," and repeated to himself: "Here at the quiet limit of the world. Here at the quiet limit of the world" ... as a monk will repeat a simple pregnant text, over and over again in prayer.”

— Evelyn Waugh

“My father ran a CB radio business. I grew up in a cluttered space that was filled with radios and antennas. It felt alien.”

— Rashid Johnson

“During the Depression, my dad made radios to sell to make extra money. Nobody had any money to buy the radios, so he would trade them for dogs. He built kennels in the backyard, and he cared for the dogs.”

— Betty White

“When people don't have free access to books, then communities are like radios without batteries.”

— Anne Lamott

“You talk about Japanese technocracy and you get radios.”

— Gordon Sinclair

“The radios are going to dictate. That's another fight. That's another story there. I wish they just let it be.”

— Bernie Worrell

“It's a really unfair world because life is, where I am; all day long we listen to American music. So I don't see why the radios in the U.S. cannot even put aside one hour a day just to play music that is not American.”

— Miriam Makeba

“I hate modern car radios. In my car, I don't even have a push-button radio. It's just got a dial and two knobs. Just AM. One knob makes it louder, and one knob changes the station. When you're driving, that's all I want.”

— Chris Isaak

“Rings and magazines; keychains and umbrellas; hats and glasses; rattles and radios. They looked like different things, but Ralph thought they were really all the same thing: the faint, sorrowing voices of people who had found themselves written out of the script in the middle of the second act while they were still learning their lines for the third, people who had been unceremoniously hauled off before their work was done or their obligations fulfilled, people whose only crime had been to be born in the Random ... and to have caught the eye of the madman with the rusty scalpel.”

— Stephen King

“Victor Papenack, who was teaching design, had his students making radios for a penny each that could be shipped to Third World people.”

— Miriam Schapiro

“The most basic mobile phone is in fact a communications devices that shames all of science fiction, all the wrist radios and handheld communicators. Captain Kirk had to tune his fucking communicator and it couldn't text or take a photo that he could stick a nice Polaroid filter on. Science fiction didn't see the mobile phone coming. It certainly didn't see the glowing glass windows many of us carry now, where we make things amazing happen by pointing at it with our fingers like goddamn wizards.”

— Warren Ellis

“The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios ... We were all in it together.”

— Charles Bukowski

“I sat back down and poured a glass of wine. I left my door open. The moonlight came in with the sounds of the city: juke boxes, automobiles, curses, dogs barking, radios ... We were all in it together. We were all in one big shit pot together. There was no escape. We were all going to be flushed away.”

— Charles Bukowski

“There's no magic line between an application and an operating system that some bureaucrat in Washington should draw. It's like saying that as of 1932, cars didn't have radios in them, so they should never have radios in them.”

— Bill Gates

“Though she knew even less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate.”

— Thomas Pynchon

“The human animal originally came from out-of-doors. When spring begins to move in his bones, he just must get out again. Moreover, as civilization, cement pavements, office buildings, radios have overwhelmed us, the need for regeneration has increased, and the impulses are even stronger.”

— Herbert Hoover

“The urge to miniaturize electronics did not exist before the space program. I mean our grandparents had radios that was furniture in the living room. Nobody at the time was saying, 'Gee, I want to carry that in my pocket.' Which is a non-thought.”

— Neil DeGrasse Tyson

“In the 1920s and 30s, when Radio Shack was young, a much earlier generation of nerds swarmed into these tiny shops to talk excitedly about building radios and other transmission devices. You might say that Radio Shack helped define gadget culture for four generations, from radio whizzes up to smartphone dorks.”

— Annalee Newitz

“I've done so many interviews over the years in so many different languages. Radios. Papers. Magazines. There's always another interview to do. It's quite something, I have to say.”

— Roger Federer

“Will looked at Evie funny. "Advertising?"
"Yes. You've heard of it, haven't you? Swell modern invention. It lets people know about something they need. Soap, lipstick, radios-or your museum, for instance. We could start with a catchy slogan, like, 'The Museum of American Folklore, Superstition, and the Occult-we've got the spirit!”

— Libba Bray

“Americans of all ages embraced TV unhesitatingly. They felt no loyalty to network radio, the medium that had entertained and informed them for a quarter-century. When something came along that they deemed superior, they switched off their radios without a second thought.”

— Terry Teachout

“There had been many definitions of Man; he would make another: "The noise-producing animal." Now there was only the nearly imperceptible murmur of his own engine. He had no need to blow the horn. There were no back-firing trucks, no snorting trains, no pounding planes overhead. In the little towns no whistles blew or bells rang or radios blared or people talked. Even if it was the peace of death, still that was a kind of peace.”

— George R. Stewart

“Ah, you poor fools, walking so tall and haughty with your guns and your sticks and your wide belts full of gear like the second coming of Batman, sitting in your little cars full of mechanized fear as you reach for your little radios at the first sign of anything more worrisome than a jaywalker.”

— Steven Brust

“We had had many joggers in prison. I found them smug.
About the young man and his radio. I decided that he had bought the thing as a prosthetic devices, as an artificial enthusiasm for the planet. He paid as little attention to it as I paid to my false front tooth. I have since seen several young men like that in groups - with their radios tuned to different stations, with the radios engaged in a spirited conversation. The young men themselves, perhaps having been told nothing but "shut up" all their lives, had nothing to say.”

— Kurt Vonnegut

“So we said, "OK, we'll do Apple Computer." In those days there was no money yet in this microcomputer business, and big experienced companies and investors, analysts-those kind of people, that are trained in business and much smarter than we were-they didn't think that this was going to be a real big market. They thought it was going to be a little hobby thing, like home robots or ham radios, that a few techie people would get into and really it wasn't going to go to the masses.”

— Jessica Livingston

“Don't you miss the world?"
He is quiet; so is she. Both ride spirals of memory.
"I have the whole world right here," he says, and taps the cover of Darwin. "And in my radios. Right at my fingertips.”

— Anthony Doerr

“Their constant outward-looking, their mania for radios, cars, and a thousand other trinkets made them dream and fix their eyes upon the trash of life, made it impossible for them to learn a language which could have taught them to speak of what was in their or others' hearts. The words of their souls were the syllables of popular songs.”

— Richard Wright

“Many jazz musicians affect a misunderstood-genius air when they play, which alienates the audience and breaks down the communications of the music. A musician's responsibility is to get as much of his art across as possible. Musicians used to be kept when only the rich could afford art, but now practically everyone can afford radios, stereo equipment, concert tickets, etc. A musician must learn to communicate to survive.”

— Gabor Szabo

“You'd never last in South America. Fans take their radios to the stadium so they can think what the commentators think.”

— Simon Kuper

“There are hundreds of electromagnetic cases where spacecraft have been observed by police, military personnel and civilians to affect car engines, radios and other electric devices.”

— Steven M. Greer

“Telephones in 2020 will be archaic, relics of a bygone era-like transistor radios are today. Telephony, which will be entirely IP-based by then, will be a standard communications chip on many devices. We'll probably carry some kind of screen-based reading device that will perform this function, though I assume when we want to communicate verbally, we'll do so through a tiny, earplug-based device.”

— Josh Quittner

“So many sins against the poor cry out to high heaven! One of the most deadly sins is to deprive the laborer of his hire. There is another: to instill in him paltry desires so compulsive that he is willing to sell his liberty and his honor to satisfy them. We are all guilty of concupiscence, but newspapers, radios, television, and battalions of advertising men (woe to that generation!) deliberately stimulate our desires, the satisfaction of which so often means the degradation of the family.”

— Dorothy Day

“Everywhere I go, kids walk around not with books under their arms, but with radios up against their heads. Children can't read or write, but they can memorize whole albums.”

— Jesse Jackson

“If America is at war, I won't speak a word without measuring how it'll sound to the guys doing the fighting when they're listening to their radios in the desert.”

— John F. Kerry

“I like turning on two radios at once. I like hearing things wrong ... I get a lot of ideas by mishearing things.”

— Tom Waits

“I had always been - everybody kind of likes comedy. I was very interested in comedy, beyond just liking it. I had friends that took apart radios; I wanted to take apart jokes.”

— Chris Rock