Your culture sets your expectation for what is 'normal.' — James Clear
In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment. — Shirin Neshat
The culture we live in determines which behaviors are attractive to us. — James Clear
Modern culture is a mighty force. It is either subservient to the gospel or else it is the deadliest enemy of the gospel — John Gresham Machen
The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America. — Jim Jarmusch
Our culture will become like it was during the medieval times when there truly was a cultural elite. The rest of the people will just watch television, which will be their only frame of reference. — Jackie Kennedy
Whether we're talking about race or gender or class, popular culture is where the pedagogy is, it's where the learning is. — Bell Hooks
The vitality of a culture is in its capacity to assimilate foreign influences. The culture that's defensive and closed condemns itself to decadence. — Juan Goytisolo
Culture is like a smog. To live
within it, you must breathe some of it in and, inevitably, be
contaminated. — Richard K. Morgan
A culture is a total way of life. It embraces what people ate and what they wore; the way they walked and the way they talked; the manner in which they treated death and greeted the newborn. — Walter Rodney
The culture we have does not make people feel good about themselves. And you have to be strong enough to say if the culture doesn't work, don't buy it. — Morrie Schwartz
Culture hides more than it reveals, and strangely enough what it hides, it hides most effectively from its own participants. — Edward T. Hall
No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive. — Mahatma Gandhi
Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. — Peter Saville
Mainstream Society Quotes
The poor in our countries have been shut out of our minds and driven from the mainstream of our societies, because we have allowed them to become invisible. — Martin Luther King, Jr.
We can't just have mainstream behavior on television in a free society, we have to make sure we see the whole panorama of human behavior. — Jerry Springer
Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself. — Julian Bond
You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Muslim communities themselves, as they expect mainstream society to stand down racists, must do more to also stand down the Islamist extremists. — Maajid Nawaz
One of those blocks (that prevent the 'Middle East from entering the mainstream of modernity') is the orthodox tenet that the Koran and the scriptures contain all the knowledge required to deal with the problems of contemporary society. — Arnold Beichman
If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream. — Jonathan Kozol
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.
When ghettos become the mainstream of society, islands of individuality cannot help but harbor an elite. — Anton Szandor LaVey
Speak out, educate, do not be intimidated by the apologists, and do not let extreme racism be mainstreamed. Hopefully there will come a time when we don't need to tell our kids that Halloween is no excuse for hate, and that blackface has no place in a civilized society. — Christine Pelosi
Mainstream cinema raises questions only to immediately provide an answer to them, so they can send the spectator home reassured. If we actually had those answers, then society would appear very different from what it is. — Michael Haneke
The vast majority of the population seems to look down their noses upon self-reliance as some quaint dusty relic, entertained only by the hyperparanoid or those hopelessly incapable of fitting into mainstream society. — Cody Lundin
Mainstream Quotes
My main goal in life is to just be happy. I don't compromise my happiness for anything. If I find what makes me happy I'm going to do that. That's really going with the flow of life. As far as like the mainstream stuff, if my destiny takes me there and I end up going that route, then that's fine. — Jhene Aiko
I don't really have control over my direct impression on people anymore. I used to be the person putting my CD in people's hands. But I'm kind of a mainstream artist now. Not by choice. — Chance the Rapper
Damn it, if just 5% of people got motivated in some direction, and it doesn't necessarily have to be what I believe in, but if they just got motivated and stopped getting their political ideologies from the mainstream media, they would go out and figure out what they want. — Alex Jones
I think music in itself is healing. It's an explosive expression of humanity. It's something we are all touched by. No matter what culture we're from, everyone loves music.
I think I fish, in part, because it's an anti-social, bohemian business that, when gone about properly, puts you forever outside the mainstream culture without actually landing you in an institution. — John Gierach
Lawyers are like beavers: They get in the mainstream and damn it up. — John Naisbitt
The people that control your financial markets, institutions and the people that control your main stream media, they now control your governments. — Douglas Macgregor
Your culture is your brand
Most of what I listen to now is mainstream jazz from 1935 right up to and including early bebop and cool jazz. — Dave Van Ronk
I don't like anything in the mainstream and they don't like me. — Bill Hicks
Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view. — Edward O. Wilson
Many of you already read my writings indicating that TV is the new god. There is a little thing I neglected to mention up until now, television is the major mainstream infiltration for the new satanic religion. — Anton Szandor LaVey
Mainstream Media Quotes
Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have. — Richard S. Salant
Mainstream media tend to just mouth the conventional wisdom, to see everything through the filter of right and left. — Arianna Huffington
The official keepers of the Holocaust wage an international campaign to silence the disturbing questions. Most people never even hear the revisionist position because Jewish forces dominate the media and block mainstream access to material that questions Holocaust orthodoxy. — David Duke
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
The two enemies are the deep state and the main stream media. The mainstream media, and an older life was to hold the government accountable.. but who is holding the media accountable? It doesn’t exist in our ecosystem. — Vivek Ramaswamy
Now, the political class tries to make sense of all of this, but they can't, because never has the political class or the mainstream media that covers them been more out of touch with the American people than they are today. — Marco Rubio
Jazz is like a big secret club. The mainstream media doesn't pay any attention to it, it's like 1 percent of the music market - no one cares. Why? Because the majority of jazz is old. — Robert Glasper
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
I wasn't passionate about food until I'd been cooking for a while. I started long before food became part of the mainstream media. I just wanted to cook, period. — Bobby Flay
The mainstream media has its own agenda. They do not want to print the facts. They have an agenda, they have a slant, they have a bias. It is outrageous to me. — Curt Weldon
It is almost superfluous to say that there is no such thing as a free and independent press among the mainstream news media today. In fact, the major media more resembles a propaganda machine than it does a free press. — Chuck Baldwin
As the mainstream media has become increasingly dependent on advertising revenues for support, it has become an anti-democratic force in society. — Robert McChesney
Not Mainstream Quotes
Islamophobia has become so mainstream in this country that Americans have been trained to expect violence against Muslims - not excuse it, but expect it. And that's happened because you have an Islamophobia industry in this country devoted to making Americans think there's an enemy within. — Reza Aslan
Women will not simply be mainstreamed into the polluted stream. Women are changing the stream, making it clean and green and safe for all - every gender, race, creed, sexual orientation, age, and ability. — Bella Abzug
Gooseberries should be mainstream berries! Why are chemically fattened strawberries a thing? Why not the delicious gooseberry? — Andrew Dost
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
When it comes to the culture, there's no such thing as peaceful coexistence. If we're not defending truth, fighting for Christian values in all of life, the truth will be sacrificed on the altar of mainstream secularism. — Charles Colson
I very much want to inject gay culture into the mainstream. It's not an underground tool for me. It's my whole life. — Lady Gaga
Whether something is old-fashioned or not doesn't resolve the question of whether it's true or not. I can see the temptation of simply thinking, 'Well, there's a cultural mainstream which flows neatly in one direction. You just align with it'. And that really won't do. — Rowan Williams
Democrat leaders are not only out of the American mainstream, but are also out of the Democratic mainstream. — Virginia Foxx
Chess only appeals to quite a small minority. It does not have the cachet of a mainstream popular sport. — Magnus Carlsen
Basically the subcultures formed in the U.K. because the mainstream was not satisfying the needs of certain people like myself. So through music and through style, we found our tribe, we found like-minded rebels. — Don Letts
Me as a person...I'm really laid back, I'm really an on my own time type of person so its just kind of like if I have to compromise some of that for the mainstream success...to me its not really worth it. I just like to sing. — Jhene Aiko
Too Mainstream Quotes
I think I fall into a lot of cracks in terms of I'm too something. I'm too this, I'm too that. And my music has never really had a home. I've been this floating alternative. I'm too mainstream for alternative. I'm too alternative for mainstream. And I'm just kind of wandering. — K. D. Lang
I do think it's important for black writers to show that we too can make it into the mainstream. Growing up, I didn't just watch The Cosby Show, I watched Growing Pains and Family Ties too. We can tell those stories too. — Lena Waithe
For a seriously autistic kid, the best prognosis might be getting into a mainstream school without being too much of a shadow. For a moderately autistic kid the best prognosis is full recovery. — Jenny McCarthy
The minimum wage is the black teenage unemployment act. It is the guaranteed way of holding the poor, the minorities and the disenfranchised out of the mainstream is if you price their original services too high. — Arthur Laffer
You can never be too sexy for mainstream television. — Erika Jayne
I'm not sure what kept me from the mainstream. I thought it was because I was too hard to pin down genre-wise. — Princess Superstar
I am sent too many mainstream scripts in which the older woman is really quite grotesque. Sometimes you read a script and you feel quite sick that they have to caricature older women in such a negative way. — Sigourney Weaver
For all its faults, it is partisanship - based on core principles- that clarifies our debates, that prevents one party from straying too far from the mainstream and that constantly refreshes our politics with new ideas and new leaders. — Tom DeLay
A lot of dudes can't function too long in mainstream life because they've been indoctrinated into that penal system where that shapes their life. — Sadat X
WikiLeaks serves as a back-up for those who want to tell the truth about the inner workings of government when the mainstream media is not willing or taking too long to publish. — Daniel Ellsberg
Comedy is downstream of culture, so the job of comedy, in my opinion, is to always be responding to the things that are wrong with society in that moment. Most people say that the job of the comedian is to make people laugh, yes it is but is that all? I don’t think so. I think comedians should be saying: this is what the mainstream narrative is, and here are the holes in it. Comedians should be trying to take society forward, and they should be always pushing back against the mainstream because the mainstream is the authority. Whereas what’s happening now is that you have a culture where comedians are essentially buying into mainstream culture. They are the woke ones; they are the super-woke. Comedians are super-woke. I am massively hated by many people in the comedy world because I’m not. So I’ll have plenty to talk about – no problem there! — Konstantin Kisin
America is an open society, more open than any other in the world. People of every race, of every color, of every culture are welcomed here to create a new life for themselves and their families. And what do these people who enter into the American mainstream have in common? English, our shared common language. — S. I. Hayakawa
For Filipino Americans, it's a battle for recognition, for identity in a culture where, for the mainstream, Asians tend to fade into a monochromatic racialized 'other.' — Jose Antonio Vargas
Here the oppression of women is very subtle. If we take female circumcision, the excision of the clitoris, it is done physically in Egypt. But here it is done psychologically and by education. So even if women have the clitoris, the clitoris was banned; it was removed by Freudian theory and by the mainstream culture. — Nawal El Saadawi
Noise has taken the place of punk rock. People who play noise have no real aspirations to being part of the mainstream culture. Punk has been co-opted, and this subterranean noise music and the avant-garde folk scene have replaced it — Thurston Moore
Every now and again, the alternative culture is cherished by the mainstream for what it is, rather than how it should be, like the mainstream popular music. — Thurston Moore
in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation. — Barbara Ehrenreich
Look, when I started out, mainstream culture was Sinatra, Perry Como, Andy Williams, Sound of Music. There was no fitting into it then and of course, there's no fitting into it now. — Bob Dylan
liberty, which means resisting all forms of cultural authoritarianism, be it from the right wing church, black ideologues, black nationalists, or mainstream white media. We have to accent liberty and freedom of expression and thought in all their forms. — Cornel West
I'm not really interested in participating in mainstream culture. Participating in the mainstream music business is, to me, like getting involved in a racket. There's no way you can get involved in a racket and not someway be filthied by it. — Steve Albini
It's depressing to see blacks wanting to dive into the mainstream of American commercial life. They come from a magnificent African culture based on aesthetics, and they all want to become fort builders like the vicious people who originally enslaved them. — George Carlin
I certainly can't speak for all cultures or all societies, but it's clear that in America, poetry serves a very marginal purpose. It's not part of the cultural mainstream. — Mark Strand
Since the 1960s, mainstream media has searched out and co-opted the most authentic things it could find in youth culture, whether that was psychedelic culture, anti-war culture, blue jeans culture. Eventually heavy metal culture, rap culture, electronica - they'll look for it and then market it back to kids at the mall. — Douglas Rushkoff
A lot of what used to be known as gay culture - broadly speaking, homoeroticism and being camp - has been brought into mainstream culture. I think we should be moving to an era where it's just sex. — Neil Tennant
I think the advent of the Internet gave us all a big boost, because by the time the Internet became mainstream and you could get it in your home, a lot of us were used to dealing in fan culture, writing to magazines or anything at the back of comic books. — Kevin Smith
I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you? — Lauren Greenfield
To make an absolutely gross generalization, I think a lot of people feel like if you're mixed, more often than not you're quote unquote white. So if you're mixed, you embrace the mainstream culture more than the African-American culture. — Keegan-Michael Key
I’m glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago. — Alison Bechdel
I like the idea that you would participate in mainstream culture, especially for young girls and young kids who are looking for an alternative. It's not that I'm superior, but I know that my heart is in it more than people who get into music for other reasons. — Emily Haines
What stands out to me in America was all the police vs. citizens turmoil. It's decades of bad policing, bad schooling, racism, bigotry and other factors finally spilling into mainstream culture. I would like to see America evolve on how the laws are enforced on the streets. — Henry Rollins
It's a wonderful thing to see a segment of our population that is open and eager to learn more about Chinese culture. It has filtered into the mainstream. You see credit-card ads on TV with white couples and Chinese babies. — Iris Chang
While mainstream media is led by profit, ratings and popularist culture and filtered by the current political climate, Alternative Media is lead solely by the convictions of the campaign and film maker. — Ben Edwards
You'll be fooled if you only get your hip-hop from the mainstream, you know. The things that move people are not just found in the mainstream cultures. And when we talk about hip-hop in general, hip-hop's basically preoccupied with life. — Talib Kweli
I was around New York at a time when independent cinema was at its peak and became kind of popular and mainstream. It got some hype, culturally. After that, studios started to have independent companies within their studio system, and they found bigger stars willing to do new material. That's kind of what it's turned into. — Parker Posey
'Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream of American culture and society,' and I'm sure in politics, you would have to acknowledge that it has worked. — Rush Limbaugh
Mainstream Canadians, what some might call the dominant culture, like to think this racism doesn't happen. It's important to remind people that it does and that we have work to do to end it. — Don Iveson
In many ways, American evangelicalism is somewhat stronger today than it was in, say 1955 - certainly more mainstream and influential in the culture as a whole. But, the increased strength of evangelicalism hasn't increased fast enough to compensate for the total collapse of mainline Protestantism and the pretty steady weakening of my own Roman Catholic Church. — Ross Douthat
Few [books] get translated and the ones that do have trouble making it into the mainstream. It's more likely that Americans will discover another culture through an American writer rather read a writer from that culture. — Laila Lalami
[Buzzing at the Sill] deals with the margins of America, a lot of parts unseen. Well, parts that are seen and familiar to a lot of the populace, but unseen when it comes to the parameters of what mainstream news and popular culture and Hollywood reflects. — Peter van Agtmael
Popular culture does a lot to shape attitudes. You can't compare different communities to each other, but in my lifetime the gay and lesbian community has become much more mainstream in society. I would venture to say it's in part because people began to feel more comfortable when they saw that group on TV. — Jay Ruderman
Urban pop culture is its own phenomena that is for some reason is left out of Hollywood. It's the most mainstream thing there is. — Russell Simmons
I have a conflicted relationship with musicals, because I think the music itself can be so horrendous. It's an industry that relies on appealing to a mainstream culture in order to survive. — Colin Meloy
I don't know if the podcast as a medium will ever have the cultural impact that TV and movies do. It may never be super-mainstream. — Chris Hardwick
Look, there's no denying that comics have moved dramatically into the mainstream in North American culture in the last 10 years, and for someone like me who's always tried to make a living at it, it's been great, I'm very grateful for it. But at the same time, it's not a subculture-y thing anymore; it's something that's in the New York Times and the New Yorker. — Adrian Tomine
I'm interested in the way the whole cultural landscape can shift over time. Okay, this will seem like a silly example, but look at the whole discourse around "selling out," a concept people say is irrelevant because there's no more distinction between mainstream and underground, inside and outside (which I don't really believe, but that's another issue). — Astra Taylor
Trans stories have now entered the mainstream in this fantastic way, but the most important thing is what follows from that is hopefully a shift in the experience of trans people - so that there's more acceptance in the culture to the issues they face and more support. — Tom Hooper
Mainstream media would convince you that there's commercial culture and that's all - but this other music is still here. — Michelle Shocked
Mainstream culture is like your mom: It's always a little late to catch on and gets easily confused by technology, but it means well. — Chris Hardwick
Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time. — Stephen Marche
I think a lot of male artists should and probably are thinking in the same ways. The culture has moved in a more democratic, pluralistic direction. You now find a lot of people who are looking outside of the mainstream of the history of art for their mentors. Maybe not heroes, but mentors. — Laura Owens
I hope progressive ways of thinking will permeate the "mainstream" more and more in the coming years. Goddess knows we have endured a very long spell (thirty plus years) of regressive thinking and hyper conservativism dominating our culture and national discourse. It necessitates risk taking and rule breaking by people in all walks of life to swing that pendulum back though. — Ani Difranco
In Conclusion
Which quotation resonated with you best? Did you enjoy our collection of mainstream culture quotes? Or may be you have a slogan about mainstream culture to suggest. Let us know using our contact form.
Citation
Feel free to cite and use any of the quotes in this collection of mainstream culture quotations. For popular citation styles(APA, Chicago, MLA), please use this citation page.
