Popular American Quotes

#1. I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.

Edith Wharton

#2. The most popular American fiction seems to be about successful people who win, and good crime fiction typically does not explore that world. But honestly, if all crime fiction was quality fiction, it would be taken more seriously.

George Pelecanos

#3. Why is the N.F.L. so popular? The N.F.L. grew in the comfort zone after World War II. People had money and time. A popular American sport got bigger.

George Vecsey

#4. 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

#5. It's called a gui-tar. It's used to perform American rural music. It's said to be especially popular in Texas, " he told her. "It's also the instrument of choice for playing 'the blues,' which is a form of American music that chronicles the pain caused by poor decision making.

Adam Johnson

#6. Eight Hours For What We Will is a major contribution to modern American working-class history and to the history of a changing American popular and mass culture.

Herbert Gutman

#7. I have to say I owe my career to the master composers of the Great American Songbook who have written such high-quality songs - the best popular music ever composed.

Tony Bennett

#8. This isn't a very popular idea in the American church, where we separate our love for God from our service to God. We say we love God most, but it's a vague statement that yields little action.

Francis Chan

#9. American popular culture pivoted. Once the dominant view was that the self is to be distrusted but external institutions are to be trusted. Then the dominant view was that the self is to be trusted and external constraints are to be distrusted.

David Brooks

#10. When we're talking about the "American response" to any disaster, it's not just a government response, an official response, it's a popular response.

Richard Norton Smith

#11. I grew up in the '70s and '80s, at a time that I'd argue was the absolute golden age of American popular culture. Because not only did we have all of the fantastic new stuff in print and on screens, but we had a constant supply of everything that came before, as well.

Chris Roberson

#12. This is certainly not to excuse the violence that exists on TV and films and on the Internet. But the truth is that wherever you go in Europe, there are American films and TV shows that are just as popular as at home. And you don't have that sense of violence in any other place other than America.

Irwin Winkler

#13. Out of 30 years of Second City I was probably the third African-American with the main stage cast. I was surprised when I first heard that. I think part of the reason that improvisation has never been popular with African-Americans is that it isn't popular in the inner cities.

Tim Meadows

#14. My own personal theory is that all popular music, in whatever form it is, to me, it all comes from Africa. Whether it's filtered through America or whatever - African-American. But I still think there's something in that roots music that's very, very African, and I think that's what unites people.

Paul Weller

#15. Before 'American Idol' and all this stuff, I was obsessed with music charts, and I used to go online to find out what was popular in other countries. I'd log on to the BBC website, and that's how I found out about artists like Natasha Bedingfield, Daniel Bedingfield and Take That.

David Archuleta

#16. I was a child of American popular culture. All I did as a kid was what I could get at the local supermarket or the dime store. Nothing else was seen. Plus what was on television, or the movie theatre. That was it.

Robert Crumb

#17. For all of its well-deserved reputation for pragmatism, American popular culture frequently nurtures or at least tolerates preposterous views and theories. Witness the 9/11 'truthers' who, lacking any evidence whatsoever, claim that 9/11 was a Bush administration plot.

Michael Hayden

#18. A jazz tune, melody, or composition is usually based on either a traditional twelve-bar, eight-bar, or four-bar blues chorus or on the thirty-two-bar chorus of the American popular song.

Albert Murray

#19. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#20. Our politics, religion, news, athletics, education and commerce have been transformed into congenial adjuncts of show business, largely without protest or even much popular notice. The result is that we are a people on the verge of amusing ourselves to death.

Neil Postman

#21. He's cutting the heart out of the American dream to own a home and have a good job ... and still he's popular

Tip O'Neill on Ronald Reagan

Chris Matthews

#22. Sinatra slowly found a way to allow tenderness into the performance while remaining manly. He perfected the role of the Tender Tough Guy and passed it on to several generations of Americans. Before him, that archetype did not exist in American popular culture.

Pete Hamill

#23. I think the zenith of popular songwriting to the United States of America was that period that started in the '20s and went into the '50s. It was the period of the great American standard song.

Linda Ronstadt

#24. Superheroes were created in America, they're most popular in America, and at their best, they embody American ideals.

Gene Luen Yang

#25. 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

#26. By far my most popular novel, and one that allows me to join the small company of "respectable" writers whose fiction deals with the American West: Cormac McCarthy, Walter Van Tilburg Clark, Tom Lee and a handful of others,

Larry McMurtry

#27. When the American people elected Barack Obama and large Democrat majorities, the die was cast. ObamaCare was coming. Popular or not, constitutional or not, affordable or not, it didn't matter.

Bob Beauprez

#28. American naturalist William Morton Wheeler made the English term popular as the study of "habits and instincts."11

Frans De Waal

#29. In 1989 an American invasion, Operation Just Cause, had ousted the government of President Manuel Noriega. 'They got rid of Ali Baba but they forgot the forty thieves,' ran a popular joke in Panama.

Adam Sisman

#30. The average American child, by age eighteen, is estimated to have seen eighteen thousand murders and two hundred thousand acts of violence on television. The "death play" of popular video games is accelerating these numbers to ever-higher levels.

Richard J. Borden

#31. Yeah, I was a child of American popular culture.

Robert Crumb

#32. We are living in a time when American popular music is finally being recognized as one of our most successful exports. The demand is huge.

Billy Joel

#33. The good and bad are all tangled up together. American popular music is loved around the world because of its African rhythm. But that wouldn't have happened if it wasn't for slavery.

Pete Seeger

#34. Economic growth is necessary to keep the promise - enormously important to individual Americans - that each generation will have the opportunity to become more prosperous than the preceding one, the popular term for which is 'the American dream.'

Michael Mandelbaum

#35. Hatred of popular culture was to define a generation of American intellectuals and their claim to a superior sensibility.

Anonymous

#36. How could such a destructive man [referring to Bush] be so popular with the American people? ... Not only is he poisoning our air and water - he's poisoning our political system as well.

Barbra Streisand

#37. The valuable improvements made by the American constitutions on the popular models, both ancient and modern, cannot certainly be too much admired; but it would be an unwarrantable partiality, to contend that they have as effectually obviated the danger on this side, as was wished and expected.

Alexander Hamilton

#38. Several travelers noted that American masters wanted above all to be "popular" with their slaves - a characteristically American need that was probably rare in Brazil or the Caribbean.

David Brion Davis

#39. 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

#40. Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.

Terry Teachout

#41. Interesting Fact: During World War II Germans could spot American spies when they sat in this L Cross position. It became popular in the states after cowboys in Western movies used it, but had not caught on in Germany.

Vanessa Edwards

#42. We're absolutely American and distinctly so, I think. That's part of what people respond to outside of this country, part of the reason that we're such a huge band outside of the U.S., where we're not so popular now as we were 10 or 12 years ago.

Michael Stipe

#43. It seems to me that the American popular song, growing out of American folk music, is the basis of the American musical theater ... it is quite legitimate to use the form of the popular song and gradually fill it out with new musical content.

Kurt Weill

#44. A few of the world's most famous non-American novelists have large followings in the United States, among them Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Guenter Grass, who were both popular even before winning the Nobel.

Stephen Kinzer

#45. This is an accessible work of philosophy in the best sense, sharply focused on matters of vital human concern and free of the domain tics that mar even allegedly popular works by Anglo-American philosophers.

Mark Lilla

#46. Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader.

Camille Paglia

#47. The 'low' quality of many American films, and of much American popular culture, induces many art lovers to support cultural protectionism. Few people wish to see the cultural diversity of the world disappear under a wave of American market dominance.

Tyler Cowen

#48. In my fifty years of public life, I have never seen a man [Ronald Reagan] more popular with the American people

Tip O'Neill

#49. One week before my 17th birthday, I had a blind date with June Rose, a television actress on network soap operas, a model, and a regular on the popular Dick Clark's Saturday night 'American Bandstand' show from New York. We were married five years later, one week after my graduation from Columbia.

Robert C. Merton

#50. When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

Noam Chomsky

#51. You are, I am sure, aware that genuine popular support in the United States is required to carry out any Government policy, foreign or domestic. The American people make up their own minds and no governmental action can change it.

Franklin D. Roosevelt

#52. Have you listened to the radio lately? Have you heard the canned, frozen and processed product being dished up to the world as American popular music today?

Billy Joel

#53. American films are terribly popular all over the world and American movie stars are terribly important. I don't know why.

Vincente Minnelli