Top 100 Media Culture Quotes

#1. Romance never does go out of fashion. It's radical. But it's out of step with the current media culture.

Bob Dylan

#2. There is no room for God's Word in our culture, where our children are without reverence for God or faith in the Bible. There is no room for our Lord's creed of purity and self-denial when the media sends forth a constant barrage of profanity and indecency and materialism.

Billy Graham

#3. A culture cannot lie down with dogs and not become utterly infested with fleas. The dogs, in this case, are the mongrel media and the corporate overlords who have grown fat on manufactured controversy and fear mongering.

Steven Weber

#4. The reality is that the media are probably the most powerful of all our institutions today and they, or rather we, too often are squandering our power and ignoring our obligations. The consequence of our abdication of responsibility is the ugly spectacle of idiot culture!

Carl Bernstein

#5. The guys in New York don't know the new media. San Francisco takes more risks as a culture.

Larry Kramer

#6. For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want.

Steven Johnson

#7. Science shouldn't be just for scientists, and there are encouraging signs that it is becoming more pervasive in culture and the media.

Martin Rees

#8. Hindi cinema, now often referred to loosely by the term 'Bollywood', is one of the best-known and most widely appreciated features of contemporary Indian culture. It makes its presence felt beyond the screen throughout wider media, whether the Internet,

Rachel Dwyer

#9. In the Phaedrus, Plato argued that the new arrival of writing would revolutionize culture for the worst. He suggested that it would substitute reminiscence for thought and mechanical learning for the true dialect of the living quest for truth by discourse and conversation.

Marshall McLuhan

#10. Robert Kennedy was inspired to take on organized crime by watching the landmark movie On the Waterfront.

David Talbot

#11. I'm not actually pop culture or social media savvy. I really didn't know what Twitter was when I created an account.

Misha Collins

#12. I think there's a lot of anesthesia being - that's been pumped into American culture, the mass media television, various forms of entertainment, and the illusion of wealth that we now understand to be an illusion as well as the illusion that America is a world power.

Parker Palmer

#13. The more hideous the mental contortions, the greater the delight and bravos of the mass.

Emma Goldman

#14. The irony of the media and people in big cities is that they're charged with defining the entire culture, when in reality they don't even live in that culture. They live in such a rarified, tiny world.

Meghan Daum

#15. A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory.

Mark Kurlansky

#16. We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic.

Bell Hooks

#17. Mainstream media would convince you that there's commercial culture and that's all - but this other music is still here.

Michelle Shocked

#18. 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

#19. Music is the one place in mass media where kids editorialize to kids.

Don Williams

#20. The most successful cultural diplomacy strategy integrates people-to-people or arts/culture/media-to-people interactions into the basic business of diplomacy. The programs in Afghanistan, Egypt, and Iran all contribute to core goals of U.S. policy in those countries.

Cynthia P. Schneider

#21. Publicity is the life of this culture - in so far as without publicity capitalism could not survive - and at the same time publicity is its dream.

John Berger

#22. Materialist philosophies that treat human beings as machines or animals possess the high ground in our culture - academia, the most powerful media and many of our courts.

Marvin Olasky

#23. Newspapers provided a common culture of aspiration.

Charles Emmerson

#24. There are certain people in our popular culture that just capture people's imaginations. And in death, they become even larger. Now, I have to admit that it's also fed by a 24/7 media that is insatiable.

Barack Obama

#25. A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy.

Camille Paglia

#26. Your bullshit culture licking can't stop the death watch ticking.

Ozzy Osbourne

#27. There's a wide spectrum between a Navy SEAL hero-killer and a traumatized victim, but those are the archetypes - hashed and rehashed in the media, in popular culture, in the minds of people with a lot of preconceived notions but not much else.

Phil Klay

#28. The Romany culture is not really in the media that much and Jack Thorne wanted to portray that.

Yasmin Paige

#29. Knowing that "me" is inextricably linked to blackness, [I try to enjoy] the process of expanding beyond the expected boundaries set by existing culture, norms and media.

Baratunde Thurston

#30. Their culture is narrowly interbred, and some personal relations border on the incestuous, so they float each other's boat and write almost identical muck-raking stories. Everyone in China knows why they are, and their China-bashing is green-lighting all of us to join the onslaught.

Thorsten J. Pattberg

#31. When it comes to branding and the ever-changing social media phenomenon, you're not a mushroom. In other words, you shouldn't be kept in the dark and fed a pile of...well, you get the idea.

David Brier

#32. I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't.

G. Willow Wilson

#33. I disapproved of the fact that the government here refused to adopt the few reforms that Gorbachev put over in the field of media and the field of culture.

Stefan Heym

#34. America today is a confused society, caught up in a terror war, a culture war, and a media war, where honesty and professional standards have vanished.

Bill O'Reilly

#35. The modern cheap and fertile press, with all its translations, has done little to bring us nearer to the heroic writers of antiquity.

Henry David Thoreau

#36. In a media culture, we not only judge strangers by how they look but by the images of how they look. So we want attractive pictures of our heroes and repulsive images of our enemies.

Virginia Postrel

#37. Can-do Americans courageously go about their duty in Iraq - mostly unafraid that a culture of 2,000 years, the reality of geography, the sheer forces of language and religion, the propaganda of state-run Arab media and the cynicism of the liberal West are all stacked against them.

Victor Davis Hanson

#38. Celebrity life and media culture are probably the most overbearing pop-cultural conditions that we as young people have to deal with, because it forces us to judge ourselves.

Lady Gaga

#39. The way things happen on social media is so abusive and everyone needs to take personal responsibility for what they write and not allowing this misinterpretation and shaming culture on social media to persist.

Ashley Judd

#40. Our government, media houses, schools, must focus on creating a new culture in our society.

Sunday Adelaja

#41. In our postmodern culture which is TV dominated, image sensitive, and morally vacuous, personality is everything and character is increasingly irrelevant.

David F. Wells

#42. Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment we're born?

Chuck Palahniuk

#43. By bringing together people who share interests, no matter their location or time zone, social media has the potential to transform the workplace into an environment where learning is as natural as it is powerful.

Marcia Conner

#44. Newspapers might have as much to do in shaping the course of public events as politicians,

David Halberstam

#45. Until he (Time's founder Henry Luce) arrived, news was crime and politics.

David Halberstam

#46. Our society on a whole is trained to see young women. There are proportionally far more of them on magazine covers, on TV, and in films than int the actual population. As a result, we have a citizenry taught to see the young and ignore the not-so-young. It isn't conscious; it's Pavlovian. (13)

Victoria Moran

#47. When there is no news, we will give it to you with the same emphasis as if there were.

David Brinkley

#48. Past conference topics have included strengthening the role of fathers in children's lives, the impact of the media culture on children, the delicate balance between work and family, and family involvement in education.

Tipper Gore

#49. New York is fast paced, with enthusiastic fans and lots of media attention. Houston's slower paced, and there's more of a southern culture to the city. But both cities have unbelievable food.

Jeremy Lin

#50. In a culture where image is more important than information, style more important than substance it is not enough to possess the truth. [Christian] case makers must also master the media.

J. Warner Wallace

#51. The cultivation - even celebration - of victimhood by intellectuals, tort lawyers, politicians and the media is both cause and effect of today's culture of complaint.

George Will

#52. Because we live in a condition of ubiquitous music and media, and near infinite technological memory, it is much easier for local cultures to find an audience that resonates with their music, whether local or globally.

Kode9

#53. 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

#54. This culture of distraction was nothing new. Christianity was born into one.

Mark Sayers

#55. When you see a culture where the intellectual architects of the invasion are not shamed for their behavior but rewarded within the mainstream media culture, black comedy, satire, absurdism is the only response.

John Cusack

#56. Part of the reason you see so little about this in the Western media is that Iraq was closed off from the outside world for so long under Saddam. But I think there's a deeper reason, which is that it messes with our assumptions - not just about Iraq, but about culture and human nature.

Annia Ciezadlo

#57. We need more physicians on air. We understand the human being, experience and condition, and we need to be using media to deliver that. We cannot be afraid to entertain. Experiential phenomenon that entertains, educates. It changes peoples' ideas and culture. I believe that strongly.

Drew Pinsky

#58. It all seems so clear now. Corporate intrusion into public institutions. Corporate domination of culture and media. It happened in plain view, with us cheering on their success as if it reflected well on us. As if it was us.

Daniel Suarez

#59. People say I manipulate the media. Well, duh. We live in a media culture, so why on earth wouldn't I?

Paul Watson

#60. Whoever controls the media, the
images, controls the culture.

Allen Ginsberg

#61. If the communications media are a good destined for all humanity, then ever-new means must be found - including recourse to opportune legislative measures - to make possible a true participation in their management by all. The culture of co-responsibility must be nurtured.

Pope John Paul II

#62. Art in the art world, and culture in general, are branches of the media, which produces our political and social thinking climate.

Hans Haacke

#63. History is so fleeting and we are so busy consuming media and the contemporary culture, voraciously gobbling it up, that we have no room to look back ever, and our young people have a tough time looking back.

Steven Spielberg

#64. Visual media is the dominant art form in our present day culture, whereas poetry is, at best, a proxy. Yet poetry and film are both "dream factories."

Denise Duhamel

#65. Steampunk, the repurposing of Victorian culture and technology for contemporary fun and profit, is so ubiquitous - in media, books, fashion, music, cosplay, and maker culture - that we tend to imagine its superficial aspects are all that define it.

Paul Di Filippo

#66. The media and the rest of popular culture weren't recording people's reactions to 9/11; they were forcing made-up reactions down people's throats.

Susan Faludi

#67. I have always felt the word 'advertising' is either a diminutive or derogatory term that kind of goes with stuff people don't like, and I always felt frustrated because I felt like I was a communication artist or a media artist. The best advertising is one of the art forms of our culture.

Lee Clow

#68. We live in a media culture and whoever controls and influences and uses media the best has the power for change.

Paul Watson

#69. In Japan itself it seemed as if theory had been absorbed the same way Japanese media culture absorbed everything else - by turning it into a spectacular subcultural style.

McKenzie Wark

#70. We live in a culture where everyone's opinion, view, and assessment of situations and people spill across social media, a lot of it anonymously, much of it shaped by mindless meanness and ignorance.

Mike Barnicle

#71. It's all about media culture and people on television, and that feeling comfortable, friendly, or warm toward a candidate [in the elections] is a reason people would emotionally attach themselves to that candidate. I get the mechanics of it, I just hate that it's true.

Michael Schur

#72. His plain, undecorated, and utilitarian work reeked week of provincialism.

Andrew Pettegree

#73. If we were to do the Second Coming of Christ in color for a full hour, there would be a considerable number of stations which would decline to carry it on the grounds that a Western or a quiz show would be more profitable.

Edward R. Murrow

#74. You're right that not everything we do has to have some kind of social agenda, but that doesn't mean it can only be anesthetizing crap.

Brian K. Vaughan

#75. American journalism (like the journalism of any other country) is predominantly paltry and worthless. Its pretensions are enormous, but its achievements are insignificant.

H.L. Mencken

#76. We live in a culture of a big me. We're encouraged - we raise our kids to think how great they are, where we have to market ourselves to get through life. We're in social media, where we broadcast highlight - highlight reels of our own lives on Facebook.

David Brooks

#77. I'm thankful that we live in a crassly commercial, polarized culture, so media jackals like me have a lot of work to do.

David Brooks

#78. The same magazines which not long before advertised products which would quickly allow women to return to their war work now extolled elaborate recipes which women could attempt if they stayed home and vacated jobs for men.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

#79. In corporate culture, in sports culture, in the media, we honor those who win at all costs.

Jackson Katz

#80. Socialism is precisely the religion that must overwhelm Christianity. ... In the new order, Socialism will triumph by first capturing the culture via infiltration of schools, universities, churches and the media by transforming the consciousness of society.

Antonio Gramsci

#81. Trying to escape media influences in today's culture is as feasible as trying to protect ourselves from air pollution by not breathing.

Brene Brown

#82. Reagan's easy slippage between movies and reality is synechdochic for a political culture increasingly impervious to distinctions between fiction and history.

Michael Rogin

#83. Most people in the media aren't bad people. They just go along to get along and it's the group culture and the conditioning. As soon as they see that things are wrong, some of them will start speaking out and making a stand.

Alex Jones

#84. The clearest way to see through a culture is to attend to its tools for conversation.

Neil Postman

#85. Social media is driving the culture, it drives peoples minds literally.

Aeriel Miranda

#86. Social media technology creates a culture in which people turn into little brand managers, using Facebook, twitter, text messages to create a falsely upbeat, slightly overexuberant, external self that can be famous first in a small sphere and then, with luck, in a large one.

David Brooks

#87. Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action.

Jaron Lanier

#88. Once information slipped the bonds of gravity and friction, it tended to gather where it was most valuable.

H.W. Brands

#89. Social media does not change your culture, it reveals it.

Sandy Carter

#90. People are nervous about their kids, and they're worried about the disintegration of families and the type of media culture they're living in.

Catherine Hardwicke

#91. When the media defines something, you have to question: Is it the definition that you want applied to your culture? I'm trying to determine who's leaving the legacy, and if the legacy that is being left is a positive one.

Tim Reid

#92. Well, when it comes to inspiration, I come from San Diego originally - it's an un-media-hyped, sleepy sort of town, big on beach culture you know?

Gary Jules

#93. People are sheep. TV is the shepherd.

Jess C. Scott

#94. In an age of constant live connections, the central question of self-examination is drifting from 'Who are you?' towards 'What are you doing?

Tom Chatfield

#95. American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me.

Siri Hustvedt

#96. I work hard to stay cynical enough! I keep my expectations of our culture and our leaders low, low, low, and I do it so I don't have to be let down. And yet again I am lowballed by the brokenness of the American cultural machine.

Vinnie Tesla

#97. What they will try to do is get symbolic victories. Symbolism is important to them. They have little else. But they will strike, I believe, at centers of media, of financial, of American power, of American culture; and that is where we should place our bet.

James T. Walsh

#98. The left controls academia, the culture, and the news media.

Monica Crowley

#99. We exist in this weirdly schizo culture, where sex is everywhere in the media, and yet, at the same time, you don't sit down and have a conversation about what you did in bed last night with your friends. Despite the ubiquity of sex, it's still a taboo when it comes to day-to-day conversation.

Mary Roach

#100. Education was central to reporting.

David Halberstam

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