Quotes About Mass Culture

#1. The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition ... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning.

Roland Barthes

#2. The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world.

Chris Hedges

#3. At times, the biggest challenge in embracing simplicity will be the vague feeling of isolation that comes with it, since private sacrifice doesn't garner much attention in the frenetic world of mass culture.

Rolf Potts

#4. Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained.

Robert Warshow

#5. The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.

Susan Sontag

#6. Art has knowledge and skills, and to come to know them is to be implicitly against a culture that is against knowledge - today's mass culture, which aims to produce a lot of consuming morons.

Matthew Collings

#7. High culture can never be obliterated as long as the species continues to produce individuals with the inclination and fortitude to pursue their interests and talents against the grain of the mass culture surrounding them.

Susan Jacoby

#8. This film isn't about "white racism", or racism at all. DEAR WHITE PEOPLE is about identity. It's about the difference between how the mass culture responds to a person because of their race and who they understand themselves to truly be. And this societal conflict appears to be one that many share.

Justin Simien

#9. A steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation.

Pauline Kael

#10. Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that.

Fredric Jameson

#11. 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

#12. The kind of people who can assemble huge crowds into one spot will be the major influences on mass culture in the next decade. The rock enthusiasts have created some of the most exciting theatrical events on the planet.

Jim Morrison

#13. Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged,adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book ...

Thomas S. Monson

#14. In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished.

Walker Percy

#15. Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being.

Andrei Tarkovsky

#16. 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

#17. Realize that the banality around us that passes as "hipness" or "mass culture" is as satisfying as "mass food"-only it comes in much more unappetizing portions.

Perry Brass

#18. If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture.

Sven Birkerts

#19. The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me.

Jaron Lanier

#20. They eat the sewage that floats on the surface of the mass culture, digest it, and then get creative diarrhea
all at once. The turd look and smell exactly alike, and we call them this year's fashions, hit shows, books, and movies.

John Varley

#21. The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that.

Matthew Collings

#22. Mass culture is enlightenment in reverse. Its goal is precisely to wipe out that last little garrison of human autonomy.

Rick Roderick

#23. I want to tell beautiful stories. I know I want to tell stories that appeal to a large audience. I want to make movies that appeal to mass culture.

Steve Antin

#24. Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all of them flattering. But the true, volatile charisma of New York lies in how balkanised it is.

Jonathan Dee

#25. Television is completely another medium. For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture.

Marina Abramovic

#26. So science alone cannot solve this problem [mass extinction of humans]. It's something that we can only tackle by bringing science together with culture, economics, and even politics.

Annalee Newitz

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

Michael Rogin

#28. But would the perpetual flux and reflux of individualism reduce all personality to the level of mass consciousness? Would American culture remain neither bourgeois nor proletarian, but infantile? Would the moron, instead of the meek, inherit democracy?

Ellen Glasgow

#29. 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

#30. 60. The use of the Latin language customary in a considerable portion of the Church is a manifest and beautiful sign of unity, as well as an effective antidote for any corruption of doctrine truth.

Pope Pius XII

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

Jess C. Scott

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

Siri Hustvedt

#33. Sex is perhaps like culture - a luxury that only becomes an art after generations of leisurely acquaintance. Why we scarcely approach either as individuals - it's mass propulsion still!

Alice B. Toklas

#34. There are may of us who cannot but feel dismal about the future of various cultures. Often it is hard not to agree that we are becoming culinary nitwits, dependent upon fast foods and mass kitchens and megavitamins for our basically rotten nourishment.

M.F.K. Fisher

#35. We have to change the culture of mass violence we have.

Joe Manchin

#36. What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can't be mass marketed.

Claire Vaye Watkins

#37. We wouldn't believe that the Germans, known as the enlightened world as 'bearers of culture,' were capable of planning and carrying out, in cold blood, without pity, the mass destruction of human beings by industrial means, as if they were bedbugs, flies, or other pests to be exterminated.

Joseph Bau

#38. When we begin to think like everybody else thinks, that is dangerous. Individualism is part of our divine endowment. God made us as individuals and we are responsible before Him.

Dr. J. Otis Yoder

#39. 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

#40. The salient mystery of Dark Ages sets the stage for mass amnesia. People living in vigorous cultures typically treasure those cultures and resist any threat to them. How and why can a people so totally discard a formerly vital culture that it becomes vitally lost.

Jane Jacobs

#41. Youth must refrain from ungrateful questioning of governmental mandates ... Instead, they must dedicate themselves to study, work and military service, should learn to think and act as a mass.

Ernesto Che Guevara

#42. I don't belong to the masses, I've been against the masses all my life, and I'm not in favour of dogs.

Thomas Bernhard

#43. The sheer volume of them [mass-market fiction books] was, to me, evidence of a tired culture, one which in large measure was saying the same thing over and over again in more and more words.

Michael McGirr

#44. The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody.

John Taylor Gatto

#45. They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics.

Thomas McGuane

#46. We have taken the latter course as a culture. So there is mass confusion today
even in the evangelical church
over whether the Bible is true and over how far we should go in obeying it.

Alistair Begg

#47. It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary.

John Battelle

#48. 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

#49. 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

#50. Comic books are what novels used to be - an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal - and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.

Charles McGrath

#51. 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

#52. In the Somme valley, the back of language broke. It could no longer carry its former meanings. World War I changed the life of words and images in art, radically and forever. It brought our culture into the age of mass-produced, industrialized death. This, at first, was indescribable.

Robert Hughes

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

Don Williams

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

Bell Hooks

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

Emma Goldman

#56. 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