Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change. — John Podhoretz
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
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
What the mass media offers is not popular art, but entertainment which is intended to be consumed like food, forgotten, and replaced by a new dish. — W. H. Auden
In this Western world that we have, culture risks being [only] a form of entertainment. — Shirin Neshat
Anything popular is populist, and populist is rarely a good adjective. — Brian Eno
The concept that an artist would be revered by popular culture is an immediate dismissal of his relevance as an artist. — Thomas Kinkade
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
After pop art, graffiti is probably the biggest art movement in recent history to have such an impact on culture. — Jeffrey Deitch
The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America. — Jim Jarmusch
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
Your culture sets your expectation for what is 'normal.' — James Clear
Celebrity culture has gone crazy, and I think the reason is that real news is just not bearable, and it also seems impossible to change anything. — Chris Martin
Short Popular Culture Quotes
Celebrity culture is something that pains me. — Susie Orbach
Listen: our culture is saturated with irony whether we know it or not. — Barbara Kruger
Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong. — Oscar Wilde
Pop art is
the American Dream, optimistic, generous, and naive! — Robert Indiana
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished. — Walker Percy
Bacteria: The only culture some people have. — Hesiod
Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture. — Michael Lewis
You dont have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.
Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night. — James Wolcott
People constantly make pop-culture references. That's why it's called popular culture, because people are aware of it and reference it constantly. — Seth Rogen
Those who are able to see beyond the shadows and lies of their culture will never be understood, let alone believed, by the masses.
And so popular culture raises issues that are very important, actually, in the country I think. You get issues of the First Amendment rights and issues of drug use, issues of AIDS, and things like that all arise naturally out of pop culture. — Kurt Loder
Most of my ukulele heroes were traditional players from Hawaii, like Eddie Kamae and Ohta-san. There may not be uke stars in popular culture, but there are certainly pop stars that play uke - George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Taylor Swift, Train, and Paul McCartney. — Jake Shimabukuro
Never underestimate the power of being popular in pop culture. You have to be able to do something. You can have a good seat at the restaurant, but you still have to pay for the meal. Fame is important, but to be rich is more important. — Gene Simmons
Do not exchange your dignity for popularity.
Fashion, in a way, has become like pop culture today. With all of the communications and the Internet and the designers doing lines with big brands, it's more popular than it's ever been, but everything is all mixed together. It's become like television or music. — Nicolas Ghesquiere
We use the term pop in the art world, as in Pop Art, but we forget that its root is popular - popular culture. — Jeffrey Deitch
I don't know if I was as ambitious as to change the world, but I do feel like - the reason why I called the album "Our Version of Events" was that I feel a lot of people are not represented in pop music and popular culture. — Emeli Sande
Once you make a movie like 'Superbad,' when it's popular and you're the lead, you get offered all kinds of things and there's a temptation to make bad movies either for the money or to maintain your relevance in pop culture. — Jonah Hill
Leadership Quotes
Leadership is the capacity to translate vision into reality. — Warren G. Bennis
Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership. — Colin Powell
The challenge of leadership is to be strong, but not rude; be kind, but not weak; be bold, but not bully; be thoughtful, but not lazy; be humble, but not timid; be proud, but not arrogant; have humor, but without folly. — Jim Rohn
Management is about persuading people to do things they do not want to do, while leadership is about inspiring people to do things they never thought they could. — Steve Jobs
It is better to lead from behind and to put others in front, especially when you celebrate victory when nice things occur. You take the front line when there is danger. Then people will appreciate your leadership. — Nelson Mandela
Avoid popularity; it has many snares and no real benefit.
The most important ingredient of leadership is character. Most of the proficiencies can be learned, but what's inside you is something that's difficult to change. — Jesse Robredo
Leadership is all about people. It is not about organizations. It is not about plans. It is not about strategies. It is all about people-motivating people to get the job done. You have to be people-centered. — Colin Powell
You don't lead by hitting people over the head - that's assault, not leadership. — Dwight D. Eisenhower
It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit. — Harry S. Truman
Popular Literature Quotes
Our point isn't to make an examination of popular film but to illustrate that the yearning for a heroic adventure lies just beneath the surface of our consciousness; film, television, literature, sports, and travel are in a sense vicarious adventures. — Alan Hirsch
Magic Realism is not new. The label's new, the specific Latin American form of it is new, its modern popularity is new, but it's been around as long as literature has been around. — Terri Windling
Gossip is more popular than literature. — Hugh Leonard
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 am already so popular that anyone who vilifies me becomes more popular than I am. — Karl Kraus
Popular literature and culture used to reflect people's aspirations, pain, and passion. All those particular things are no longer available to us. — Danny Glover
The masses are still ungrateful or ignorant. They prefer murder, poisonings, and crimes generally to a literature possessed of style and feeling. — George Sand
Your culture is your brand
What good is an obscenity trial except to popularize literature? — Rex Stout
For the serious mediocre writer convention makes him sound like a lot of other people; for the popular writer it gives him a formula he can exploit; for the serious good writer it releases his experiences or emotions from himself and incorporates them into literature, where they belong. — Northrop Frye
PLATITUDE, n. The fundamental element and special glory of popular literature. A thought that snores in words that smoke. All that is mortal of a departed truth. A jelly-fish withering on the shore of the sea of thought. A desiccated epigram. — Ambrose Bierce
The popular will cannot be taken for granted, it must be created. — Herbert Croly
Popular Film Quotes
Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn. — Clark Gable
I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse. — Marlon Brando
The standardization of world culture, with local popular or traditional forms driven out or dumbed down to make way for American television, American music, food, clothes and films, has been seen by many as the very heart of globalization. — Fredric Jameson
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.
A few words of Hindi appear here or there, but it's all Urdu. I feel that if the popular culture, which is what Hindi films are, uses Urdu, it's not going to diminish. — Ismail Merchant
Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make! — Bram Stoker
I'll make him an offer he can't refuse. — Mario Puzo
Life is a giant popularity contest
Audience members are only concerned about the story, the concept, the bells and whistles and the noise that a popular film starts to make even before it's popular. So audiences will not be drawn to the technology; they'll be drawn to the story. And I hope it always remains that way. — Steven Spielberg
It's become very popular in contemporary films to have the twist ending. — Bill Paxton
My name is Inigo Montoya, you killed my father, prepare to die! — William Goldman
I was definitely surprised when Talk Radio took off as a play. As a film it has become somewhere between a popular thing and a cult thing. — Eric Bogosian
Popular Song Quotes
Like a circle in a spiral
Like a wheel within a wheel
Never ending or beginning
On an ever-spinning reel
As the images unwind
Like the circles that you find
In the windmills of your mind. — Michel Legrand
So I'm not very popular here with those inside the system, as you might guess. I never wanted to be. — Waylon Jennings
Go on and try to tear me down
I will be rising from the ground — Demi Lovato
Blue moon you saw me standing alone
Without a dream in my heart
Without a love of my own. — Lorenz Hart
Is this the real life?
Is this just fantasy?
Caught in a landslide,
No escape from reality.
Open your eyes,
Look up to the skies and see,
I'm just a poor boy, I need no sympathy,
Because I'm easy come, easy go,
Little high, little low,
Any way the wind blows doesn't really matter to me, to me. — Freddie Mercury
Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.
You must remember this, a kiss is still a kiss, A sigh is just a sigh; The fundamental things apply, As time goes by. — Herman Hupfeld
How many times can a man turn his head, and pretend that he just doesn't see? — Bob Dylan
If you don't know the blues... there's no point in picking up the guitar and playing rock and roll or any other form of popular music. — Keith Richards
Moons and Junes and Ferris wheels The dizzy dancing way you feel As every fairy tale comes real I've looked at love that way. — Joni Mitchell
Popular Music Quotes
What is classical music if not the epitome of sensuality, passion, and understated erotica that popular music, even with all of its energy and life, cannot even begin to touch? — Lara St. John
If you can imagine a man having a vasectomy without anesthetic to the sound of frantic sitar-playing, you will have some idea of what popular Turkish music is like. — Bill Bryson
Ask anyone. If it hadn't been for Elvis, I don't know where popular music would be. He was the one that started it all off, and he was definitely the start of it for me. — Elton John
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
The world's most famous and popular language is music. — PSY
The Doors embodied—incarnated—a major upheaval in popular culture. Their music was of the times and it shaped the times. — Jac Holzman
Making an album should be an honest experience. It shouldn't be about trying to gauge where popular music is today; it should be about artistic expression and putting down what you want to put down. — Scott Weiland
I remember when I was very young, I read an article by Fats Domino which has really influenced me. He said, 'You should never sing the lyrics out very clearly. — Mick Jagger
Although we are being presented in Carnegie Hall, we have to furnish a budget for our guest stars, and for the music writing - which is a huge budget in any orchestra that plays popular music. — Skitch Henderson
Rap has been a path between cultures in the best tradition of popular music. — Jay-Z
There's been a shift: Country music is popular music now. Every other genre wants to come over to our land. — Miranda Lambert
Pop Culture Quotes
First and foremost, I'm a journalist. My business is the truth. Now, I happen to be other things, too - a pop-culture phenomenon, the most in-demand speaker on the campus lecture circuit, whatever. — Milo Yiannopoulos
Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead. — Jim Morrison
I love Bane. I love the Joker. I love Batman. — Jake Paul
Superheroes fill a gap in the pop culture psyche, similar to the role of Greek mythology. There isn't really anything else that does the job in modern terms. For me, Batman is the one that can most clearly be taken seriously. — Christopher Nolan
Everything I know about pop culture I know from 'The Simpsons,' and they say the Grammys aren't very good. — Jonny Greenwood
Remember, we're madly in love, so it's all right to kiss me anytime you feel like it. — Suzanne Collins
Yeah, I don't deal with current events or pop culture, and I avoid politics like the plague. — Max Cannon
I'm absolutely obsessed with The Jesus And Mary Chain and Patti Smith, but I'm a massive pop fan. I love pop culture, It's a total reflection of the zeitgeist. — Siobhan Fahey
There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent. — Charles Krauthammer
I hate recording all the shows for the week in one day, because I want to be able to mention current events and pop culture. If Madonna punches Britney in the face today, I want to reference that on 'Wine Library TV' tomorrow. Monday's episode is always the best, because it's hot off the press. — Gary Vaynerchuk
Popular Movie Quotes
I don't have any illusion that The Creeper is as popular or will ever be as popular as any of the classic movie monsters, but I think in the heart of every young horror fan is his desire to create his own creature. — Victor Salva
I'm not interested in popular culture. I hate Quentin Tarantino. I rarely go to movies. I hate rock 'n' roll. I work. I think. I listen to classical music. I brood. I like sports cars. — James Ellroy
Ibiza is a popular vacation place for a lot of the players in Spain. If you go in the summer, there are some of the world's most famous movie and music stars, so nobody cares about soccer players. — Xavi
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room. — Peter Sellers
To me, movies are valuable as an art form and as a wonderful means of popular entertainment. But I think movies have gone terribly wrong. — Woody Allen
I'm absolutely positive it's in our human nature to want to know about the past. The two most popular movies of all time, while not historically accurate, are about core historic events: 'Gone With the Wind' and 'Titanic.' — David McCullough
I was never a fanatical movie person. There are many popular films I absolutely love like anyone else. Having said that, I don't have time to go to the movies very much. I work a lot of different things, I'm always busy. But I'm always happy to see a popular movie. — John Malkovich
It just sort of happened. I wrote like what I'd always read and what was in the movies... I'm sure popular music is supposed to be like this. — Warren Zevon
Popular Entertainment Quotes
The road goes on forever and the party never ends. — Robert Earl Keen
I’m always proud to be popular with the fans. I try to smile and do my best. If they like it, it’s even better. — Antoine Griezmann
The British brand is so popular particularly in the US that they put the union jack flag on top of beer bottles because it sells. — Liz Truss
It is almost a truism that nothing kills a money-making opportunity faster than its widespread popularity. — Thomas Phelps
Riot – A popular entertainment given to the military by innocent bystanders. — Ambrose Bierce
In the city a funeral is just an interruption of traffic; in the country it is a form of popular entertainment. — George Ade
Oh look, yet another Christmas TV special! How touching to have the meaning of Christmas brought to us by cola, fast food, and beer... Who'd have ever guessed that product consumption, popular entertainment, and spirituality would mix so harmoniously? — Bill Watterson
My esoteric doctrine, is that if you entertain any doubt, it is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance. Transit from the unpopular, is easy... but from the popular to the unpopular is so steep and rugged that it is impossible to maintain it. — Lord Melbourne
My esoteric doctrine, is that if you entertain any doubt, it is safest to take the unpopular side in the first instance. Transit from the unpopular, is easy... but from the popular to the unpopular is so steep and rugged that it is impossible to maintain it. — William Lamb, 2nd Viscount Melbourne
Crime stories are, as you know, one of the most popular forms of entertainment that exist. If you then try to have something to say... that I have, of course. — Steig Larsson
The test of a government is not how popular it is with the powerful and privileged few but how honestly and fairly it deals with the many who must depend on it. — Jimmy Carter
Reality TV is sleazy, it is manipulative. It is as momentary as anything in popular culture. — Morley Safer
I'm not saying Sonic Youth was a conceptual-art project for me, but in a way it was an extension of Warhol. Instead of making criticism about popular culture, as a lot of artists do, I worked within it to do something. — Kim Gordon
My older sister was at the cusp of new wave, and I had older brothers from my father's first marriage who were rock 'n' roll guys, so I was exposed to a lot of popular culture. — Paul Thomas Anderson
If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace. — Daniel H. Wilson
We are living at an important and fruitful moment now, for it is clear to men that the images of adult manhood given by the popular culture are worn out; a man can no longer depend on them. By the time a man is thirty-five he knows that the images of the right man, the tough man, the true man which he received in high school do not work in life. — Robert Bly
Brands and branding are the most significant gifts that commerce has ever made to popular culture. — Wally Olins
The people themselves are not a homogeneous cultural collectivity but present numerous and variously combined cultural stratifications which, in their pure form, cannot always be identified within specific historical popular collectivities. — Antonio Gramsci
If you go to Tokyo, I think it becomes very obvious that there's this almost seamless mixture of popular culture and Japanese traditional culture. — Kazuo Ishiguro
There can be no stronger proof of the impoverishment of our contemporary culture than the popular - though profoundly mistaken - definition of myth as falsehood. — Rollo May
All over the place, from the popular culture to the propaganda system, there is constant pressure to make people feel that they are helpless, that the only role they can have is to ratify decisions and to consume. — Noam Chomsky
Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least "deserving" in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty. — Philip Yancey
Popular culture tells you that schools and parents don't know what's going on, the police are dogs, politicians are all liars and scum, and any crime that's not committed by the Mafia is done by the CIA. — Stanley Crouch
If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the popular culture that advertisements are silly. — Michael Schudson
We are being swallowed up by the popular culture of the United States, but then the Americans are being swallowed up by it too. It's just as much a threat to American culture as it is to ours. — Northrop Frye
Jazz is not the popular culture. Jazz is in the same position in our culture as classical music. A very small minority of people really love it. — John Corigliano
I was delighted to become a popular-culture reference point. I'm still delighted about it actually, and I still find it to be weird. — Colin Firth
Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage. — Carl Bernstein
The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards. — Michael Medved
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
It is quite reasonable to subscribe both to the old saw that no good girl was ever ruined by a book and to the perception that it is not good for children to be constantly exposed to the sexual violence in our popular culture. Protecting children seems to me logically, legally, and rather easily differentiated from censorship. — Molly Ivins
I love California. It has such a strong contribution to the history of culture, and popular culture. For better and worse, of course. Even the worst can be interesting to some degree sometimes for somebody creative. — Hedi Slimane
Popular culture, on average, has been growing more cognitively challenging over the past thirty years, not less. Despite everything you hear about declining standards and dumbing-down, you have to do more intellectual work to make sense of today's television or games - much less the internet - than you did a few decades ago. — Steven Johnson
When I think about popular culture, I can't help but think that we're living in the age of loneliness. There's this illusion that we all have instant access to each other, but we actually have no real connection. — Madonna Ciccone
The cacophony of contemporary popular culture makes it hard to discern the call of truth and wisdom. There is no area in which practicing asceticism is more important. — Rod Dreher
What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal. — Erich Fromm
When I go to Japan and do shows I play for 1,000 to 1,500 people. I like a lot about Japan. Their popular culture and mass commercialization appeals to me. — Matthew Sweet
In my mind, there is no reason why Stoicism shouldn't become as popular as Buddhism, especially in the Western world, where the dominant culture, Christianity, itself absorbed a large number of elements from Greco-Roman Stoicism. — Massimo Pigliucci
I'm just so amazed by people who are willing to share things that, in the past, no one would have ever talked about. Folks in popular culture being willing to take on issues, I think that is such a key part of having a culture shift and an institutional shift. — Cecile Richards
The popular culture says . . . Do what you do, your life is predestined, like the installment plan on your house. There's not much you can do about it. Make your payments, live it, get sick, die, don't make any trouble. It is the Master Charge of destiny. Try to get your high credit rating. — Jerzy Kosinski
With what's happened in the world the last three years, it's easier to see why it's become popular again to diminish and revile Arabs and Muslims in American popular culture. — Tony Shalhoub
In Conclusion
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