Top 100 Mainstream's Quotes
#1. To say that everything without exception is going straight to hell is not an alternative vision but only an inversion of the mainstream's 'everything's fine.'
Rebecca Solnit
#2. I don't know why so many artists talk about the mainstream's problems from the fringe. I think, unfortunately, it's almost like our education makes us too safe and terrified to step into the world.
Mark Bradford
#3. To some extent, the mainstream's absence means the Tea Party is the Republican Party.
David Remnick
#4. 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
#5. Well, the thought that everybody might have a personal computer at their desk or their home was certainly not on the mainstream of anybody's activity at that time.
Jack Kilby
#6. Americans should know that Iranians are just as decent, human and rational as other human beings. Sadly, the mainstream media in the U.S. regularly fails to recognize and reflect this.
Mohammad Marandi
#7. The shows you can do in cable are just more buzzworthy and are about subject matter that's more unusual or dark. And broadcast shows tend to be more mainstream or middle-of-the-road.
Robert Greenblatt
#8. Mainstream media tends to showcase a very specific kind of Mardi Gras, but my experience of Mardi Gras is very different; it's very cultural.
Solange Knowles
#9. Rebecca Black might sing like a robot, but that's just proof she has evolved beyond us. Her vocal is just a slightly exaggerated version of the robot glitch-twitch stutter that's been mainstream pop vocalese for the past 10 years or so.
Rob Sheffield
#10. Pitbull is great with brands. Endorsements with hip-hop artists work because hip-hop artists typically set the most trends ... It's every brand's goal to be seen in the mainstream, and hip-hop music has become mainstream music.
Adam Kluger
#11. It's better to be the largest independent band from Brazil instead of be the smallest mainstream band.
Fernanda Takai
#12. It's wonderful to be appreciated for being quirky, and to see Zooey Deschanel and the quirky, indie film types get mainstream play is amazing for women, because women are much more complicated than what we've see on TV in the past.
Mayim Bialik
#13. Personally, I can't stand violence. In any standard American mainstream movie, there's 20 times more violence than in any one of my films, so I don't know why those directors aren't asked why they're such specialists for violence.
Michael Haneke
#14. Mainstream Jewish intellectuals became 'pro'-Israel after the June 1967 war when Israel became the U.S.A.' s strategic asset in the Middle East, i.e., when it was safe and reaped benefits. To credit them with ideological conviction is, in my opinion, very naive.
Norman Finkelstein
#15. That's the vast majority of this social media, all these reviews, all these comments. Your tools have elevated gossip, hearsay and conjecture to the level of valid, mainstream communication.
Dave Eggers
#16. I have made sense of my life by developing an ability to analyze Mainstream American Cultural Artifacts.
George W. S. Trow
#17. 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
#18. Because people love music, I feel it's my responsibility to produce more of the music and to get it out to more people, so like I said, If the mainstream route does that without compromising me being happy as a person then that's something I'll do.
Jhene Aiko
#19. Now that I'm being very successful, publishers are trying to mainstream me, but I'm unabashedly genre. It's what I like to read, what I like to write.
Laurell K. Hamilton
#20. I want to have an ending where people say: "That's the most shocking ending I've ever seen in a mainstream horror film."
Eli Roth
#21. I'm saying that there's way more to 9/11 than mainstream media and our government have told us.
Jesse Ventura
#22. Rand Paul does not like being compared to his father Ron any more than sons named Bush like to dance in their father's shadow, but the crucial difference is that while the Bushes all hail from the relative mainstream of the GOP, the Pauls have an ideological tributary virtually to themselves.
Nancy Gibbs
#23. 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
#25. 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
#26. What I love about Sonny's playing is that he is so inventive within the mainstream Jazz vernacular. Because he knows so many ways to deal with musical material, he is never repetitive and hasn't had to invent a new language. Also, he never asked me to do anything but swing!
Pete La Roca
#27. I think it's pretty obvious that women's stories are not necessarily being told in Hollywood and women are not necessarily being put in the leadership positions they deserve in mainstream film.
Diablo Cody
#28. The roots of rap are originally ghetto-ised or extremely working class. So when you're an artist who's making something which isn't how its mainstream appearance should be, there's always these strange questions of authenticity and what you have to do to be 'real' as a rapper.
Zadie Smith
#29. Mainstream media would convince you that there's commercial culture and that's all - but this other music is still here.
Michelle Shocked
#30. It's been a concern of mine for years that the mainstream media coverage of culture and politics takes place in two nodes, Washington and New York, and yet all the voting goes on somewhere else.
Walter Kirn
#31. Sex and gender are such befuddling mysteries even for those of us who are in the mainstream that you'd think we'd be wary of being judgmental. Yet much of society clings to a view that gender is completely binary, when, in fact, there's overwhelming evidence of a continuum.
Nicholas Kristof
#32. It's becoming obvious to most that mainstream media is nothing but a megaphone for the global elite to present biased news that's designed to align the masses with their agenda.
James Morcan
#33. I didn't grow up watching TV or going to McDonald's or listening to mainstream music. Like, the casting agents are looking elsewhere for the cheerleader role.
Summer Phoenix
#34. 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
#35. Look, it's a mainstream animated movie, and how often are those considered thought provoking? It's meant to be a great time at the theater, but it's also designed to work on more than one level.
Brad Bird
#36. It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff, writing and making movies and TV, but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.
Nathan Fillion
#37. In mainstream romantic comedies, I'm usually tearing my hair out. It's just a devastatingly difficult genre for me.
Carter Burwell
#38. Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#39. It's just odd that something as essential in life as sex has been flattened out in mainstream cinema - and in art cinema. Even in art movies, sex always seems to be treated negatively. Why does it always end in disaster?
John Cameron Mitchell
#40. His fierce appreciation of female beauty, the unrelenting desire he felt for their company, the pleasure he both derived and sought to give, had led him in and out of quite a few bedroom doors.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#41. People might look at you as super-weird, but if that's your obsession, go for it. I do like a lot of mainstream stuff, and sometimes I also like different stuff. I tend to always root for the underdog.
Kristen Bell
#42. It's very important to me to find ways to relate the audience to the characters. This is the first thing to go in most mainstream horror films.
Ti West
#43. 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
#44. I feel like science fiction is so much more mainstream now than it has been. And I feel like that's because technology has caught up with us.
Alaina Huffman
#45. There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.
Cornel West
#46. I don't care at all about the mainstream; I don't care about popularity contests; I don't care about who's got the biggest-selling album; and I don't care about glossy production.
Phil Anselmo
#47. Humans haven't quite figured out how to generate energy by pulling it out of the vacuum, but that's according to mainstream science.
Anonymous
#48. To ask whether the mainstream media has a conservative or liberal bias is like asking whether al-Qaida uses too much oil in their hummus. It's - I think they might use too much oil in their hummus - but it's the wrong question.
Al Franken
#49. I think Edward Sharpe's music is counter-cultural music in the strangest sense where you have a time now where love, optimism, hope and community are uncool and not part of the mainstream culture.
Alex Ebert
#50. 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
#51. And although he recognized that tenderness was not the same as passion, and certainly not equivalent to love, for now it seemed to him a suitable substitute.
Roy L. Pickering Jr.
#52. If I came across a role that is completely mainstream [and] commercial, but it's the right one, I'd jump at the chance.
Kylie Minogue
#53. The key to changing the way people think is to change what's popular. That's why rather than submit to the mainstream, you have to become it - and then overcome it.
Marilyn Manson
#54. Some of the hip-hop stuff people get into is exciting, because there's a passion and there's something to explain to a more mainstream audience, so you get these passionate writers who want to express their love for rap and hip-hop, which is cool.
Cameron Crowe
#55. A lot of very popular mainstream artists are products of record companies and marketing companies, and any time anyone can stand outside of that, that's interesting.
Marco Brambilla
#56. I want to make it clear: it's not that I hate mainstream cinema. It's perfectly fine. There are a lot of people who need to escape, because they are in very difficult situations, so they have the right to escape from the world. But this has nothing to do with an art form.
Michael Haneke
#57. In the Indian film industry, especially those of us who are in mainstream cinema, we invariably play a typical hero's role. More often than not, we cater to the public perception. However, there is a latent desire in most actors to do a role where you can go all out and experiment.
Abhishek Bachchan
#58. Anytime rock and metal can get on mainstream TV at all, it's a good thing.
Eddie Trunk
#59. 'Jane's World' has pushed the boundaries for mainstream comic strips: girls have kissed, punched each other, have been abducted by aliens, taken steamy showers together and turned into monkeys. Jane has been through a lot and I love her for it.
Paige Braddock
#60. And it's always the same kind of artist, I think, who has more enjoyment being slightly on the outside of things, who doesn't want to be sucked into the tyranny of the mainstream. Because once you get sucked into that, you're dead as an artist.
David Bowie
#61. I think that's a part of what motivates me in my teaching and writing. Once the Gospel feels mainstream and becomes a nicely organized, orchestrated belief system, frankly, I don't think there is even an attraction to the human spirit.
Erwin McManus
#62. The poetry and transgression that was so much of surrealism's anarchic force has been recruited into mainstream culture. It has been made commonplace by television and magazine merchandising, by computer games and Internet visuals, by film and MTV, by the fashion shoot.
Graham Joyce
#63. Maurice Kenny stands at the forefront of his generation. Few writers of any ethnicity are destined to be remembered in the mainstream of literary history; I believe that Kenny's contributions as a poet are among those few. He writes from the center, as our Elders would say.
Wendy Rose
#64. 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
#65. It's nice to have something you think separates you from the mainstream and gives you perspective on that, but it can become very limiting at the same time if it's something you use to artificially define yourself.
Dale Peck
#66. What I've become good at is bringing things that aren't necessarily mainstream to the mainstream. What I did see on Twitter was a potential for mass publication; it's a mainstream consumer broadcasting device. It transforms customers and companies. You have to be transparent or you fail.
Ashton Kutcher
#67. Those who say that the West and Islam are eternally irreconcilable have more in common with the Islam extremists than they might like to think, for it's the very same argument of course advanced by Al-Qaida. And they do have it wrong. We need to work with mainstream Islam.
Pauline Neville-Jones
#68. Here's why I like geek culture: People like what they like because they like it. They're not trying to fit into any mainstream likes or dislikes.
Kristen Bell
#69. 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
#70. We come from the days when rap used to agitate the mainstream. Now it's more buddy-buddy. That doesn't sit well with me. So what we need is [a bit more] street politics, bringing up issues, agitating you a little bit. And nothing can agitate you more now than a terrorist threat.
Ice Cube
#71. 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
#72. Fortunately I don't want to be part of the mainstream. When I see a Kiki Smith work, for example, she's very contemporary, and I feel a lot of emotion in each of her pieces; I think she understands our time, and she makes really interesting art because of that.
Luis Gonzalez
#73. I didn't remember much partisan division in Kansas when I was growing up. People here had been more mainstream then. A strong current of practical common sense and reasonableness had run through both Ward's and my childhoods. We recognized it in each other.
Julene Bair
#74. The national Democratic Party has embraced abortion on demand. I believe this position is wrong in principle and out of the mainstream of our party's historic commitment to protecting the powerless.
Robert Casey
#75. If you ask me what I worry about every morning when I wake up, it's that I don't understand future mainstream Internet users' habits.
Ma Huateng
#76. When independent films break through and actually make it into any level of mainstream-ness or get seen by people or find a life actually in theaters, it's extraordinary. And it doesn't happen that often.
Karen Allen
#77. The Protestant Reformation had a lot to do with the printing press, where Martin Luther's theses were reproduced about 250,000 times, and so you had widespread dissemination of ideas that hadn't circulated in the mainstream before.
Nate Silver
#78. Everyone believes that the prospect for a civil war has diminished significantly over the past several days. All the mainstream leaders of Iraq believe that civil war must be avoided. It's very positive that they are all saying it.
Zalmay Khalilzad
#79. I think Ron Paul's views are totally outside the mainstream of virtually every decent American.
Newt Gingrich
#80. (On Barack Obama) I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man.
Joe Biden
#81. But I think the thing I'm proud of about the film is that there aren't many films - either independent films or mainstream Hollywood films - that are like this; it's of its own times, and it's the film Mike Nichols wanted to make.
Patrick Marber
#82. The fact is, when you hear the Republican candidates on immigration, when you see them and hear them talk about contraception, mammograms, abortion, and not the economy, it's clear to me they're moving farther and farther away from the mainstream.
Antonio Villaraigosa
#83. There's the exciting part about comedy - if you catch an act just before they go mainstream, that's the best. After they hit the mainstream, everything gets watered down a little bit.
Tommy Chong
#84. In the 21st century men's tits have not just rivalled but replaced women's as the touchstone of 'sexy' in mainstream pop culture, even when the audience for them is other men.
Mark Simpson
#85. Skating was popular, but it wasn't mainstream. It had this underground following, and you could go on tours, win decent prize money, and make royalties from signature products - that's how I came to buy a house when I was a senior in high school.
Tony Hawk
#86. Mainstream success is important - that's probably anathema to an indie publication like Pitchfork, but it's what I believe having experienced it personally.
Courtney Love
#87. Predation is part of the everyday life of capitalism, in sectors as mainstream as pharmaceuticals, software and oil - where people's money, their data, their time and their attention are routinely taken in fundamentally asymmetrical exchanges.
Geoff Mulgan
#88. I think that there's a lot of anxiety out there in people wanting their children to be part of the mainstream, to achieve based on the well-worn yardsticks.
Ron Suskind
#89. Absolute 80's is three hours of mainstream 80's music. I also do New Wave Nation that is more cutting edge. It is more punk stuff from the 70's to the 90's.
Nina Blackwood
#90. If it's accessible by hundreds of millions of people, then it's as mainstream as it gets.
Warren Ellis
#91. I think that you take the path of least resistance. And for a lot of people comedy is that path. I mean, even against mainstream, it's easier to sell a comedy than a drama.
Kevin Grevioux
#92. I think of my books as mainstream and that's were most people who read them look for them in book stores.
Jean M. Auel
#93. I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.
Eli Roth
#94. The growing "epidemic" of stress, lifestyle diseases, and autoimmune diseases has no root cause according to mainstream medicine, yet that root cause seems simple to us: it's really an epidemic of not loving the self.
Louise L. Hay
#95. I feel like, as musicians, we need to fight the Spotify thing. I feel that in some ways what's happening in the mainstream is the last gasp of the old industry. Once that does finally die, which it will, something else will happen.
Thom Yorke
#96. There's a negative connotation to internet trolls, but at the same time this is becoming mainstream. This kind of speech pattern, the way people speak, this is common on the internet.
Rush Limbaugh
#97. Obviously, there are conservatives who are in the mainstream and conservatives who would take people's rights away.
Charles Schumer
#98. It's that I wasn't suited to do the kind of comedy that these people were coming to hear - mainstream comedy.
Larry David
#99. Video games have become this really weird medium where it's not quite mainstream but it's not quite art either.
Mike Tucker
#100. Of course, there's a certain type of person who feels that anything which becomes mainstream has to be rejected immediately. And that's part of the indie-alternative snobbery and hierarchy and elitism.
Alex Kapranos
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