Quotes About Popular Culture

#1. I love memoirs. They are probably my favorite literary form, along with biographies. The more confessional, the better. There is so, so, so little truth in the popular culture, and I am starved and grateful for any I can find.

Anne Lamott

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

Robert Crumb

#3. I felt that a lot of Viking culture had been caricatured and misconstrued. After all, they were far more democratic than the Saxons and the Francs, who were exercising really hierarchical social structures at that time. The Vikings had popular meetings where everything could be discussed.

Michael Hirst

#4. Contemporary fiction is the hardest for me because I am not really in the popular culture - I don't watch TV.

Gail Carson Levine

#5. It seems you can't go anywhere today without seeing some popular culture rendition of Vampyres. I went into a bookstore a few weeks ago and there was an entire section devoted to Teenage Paranormal Romance. Can you imagine?

Abramelin Keldor

#6. Reality TV is sleazy, it is manipulative. It is as momentary as anything in popular culture.

Morley Safer

#7. Because I'm associated with an avant-garde sensibility, people think I'm looking down on popular culture, but I don't want to be part of a new elitism.

Robert Wyatt

#8. Give the People what they want - and they'll get what they deserve.

The Kinks

#9. It's not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phaontom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may "get the girl" - but usually only with a pickax.

Andrew Davidson

#10. On the other hand, there is also the matter of Lovecraft's place in popular culture.

Ross E. Lockhart

#11. So, my fellow Christians, protest this film if you like, but then how about devoting some energy to fill the vacuum created by your retreat from popular culture.

Cal Thomas

#12. In their heyday, comics were a dominant force in popular culture, but that's over.

Garry Trudeau

#13. Popular culture is morally bankrupt, flagrantly licentious and utterly materialistic-and Madonna is the worst of all.

Tipper Gore

#14. The history of modern culture is a history of popular entertainments evolving into art.

Andrew Hoberek

#15. I remember the dark days when, thanks to 1966's 'Batman' with Adam West, comics were considered the ugly stepchild of popular culture.

Marc Guggenheim

#16. Some of these pro-drug messages come from popular culture.

John Walters

#17. While the patriarchal boys in hip-hop crew may talk about keeping it real, there has been no musical culture with black men at the forefront of its creation that has been steeped in the politics of fantasy and denial as the more popular strands of hip-hop.

Bell Hooks

#18. Popular culture has made it okay to yell "I want a man!" from the rooftops, so why are we still embarrassed to say, "I want a best friend"?

Rachel Bertsche

#19. 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

#20. I've finally figured out why soap operas are, and logically should be, so popular with generations of housebound women. They are the only place in our culture where grown-up men take seriously all the things that grown-up women have to deal with all day long.

Gloria Steinem

#21. Popular culture no longer craves archangels and new dawns. Pop culture traffics in vampires and deads of night.

James Wolcott

#22. Now there's a whole generation of filmmakers who grew up making their own films with video cameras, and have dined entirely on a diet of popular culture. It's been reflected in a lot of their work. It's self-reflective, it's quite knowing, but it's very literate.

Simon Pegg

#23. The experience of being on a show that is very much in the center of popular culture is exciting. You really feel like you're reaching people.

Aasif Mandvi

#24. Popular music is a microcosm of the culture, Eliza. It reflects the mentality of the population.

Tiffanie DeBartolo

#25. I don't think we have enough imaginary creatures in cinema. It seems like we're stuck with zombies, vampires, and werewolves. We should have everything. We should have minotaurs. We should have elves. We should have mermen in popular culture. But instead we've stuck with vampires.

Neil Jordan

#26. I quite often feel that my greatest task as a father is to raise children who love what is good, true, and beautiful, and who are therefore aliens in this popular culture.

Rod Dreher

#27. I am one with the popular culture.

Lloyd Blankfein

#28. It always amused me to observe the pathetically desperate hunger expressed in popular culture for life-forms on other planets, when underneath the very feet of these seekers of aliens, and roundly ignored by them, were the most exotic, grotesque, and fabulous life-forms imaginable.

David Cronenberg

#29. If popular culture has taught us anything, it is that someday mankind must face and destroy the growing robot menace.

Daniel H. Wilson

#30. The things that are most popular are usually rubbish, stand up for what's important, not popular.

Alan Moore

#31. Basically, Koreans are the Marlboro Men of Asia.

Euny Hong

#32. 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

#33. I don't go to movies, I don't own a television, I don't buy magazines and I try not to receive mail, so I'm not really aware of popular culture.

Jesse Eisenberg

#34. I think if the United States gave anything to culture at large in the 20th century, the most important contribution made was the popular song.

Linda Ronstadt

#35. Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.

Mason Cooley

#36. 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

#37. How shall we ever make the world intelligent of our movement? I do not think that the answer lies in trying to render feminism easy, popular, and instantly gratifying. To conjure with the passive culture and adapt to its rules is to degrade and deny the fullness of our meaning and intention.

Adrienne Rich

#38. 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

#39. I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?

Alice Hoffman

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

Anonymous

#41. 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

#42. I've noticed that women are always punished for their sexuality in popular culture.

Jill Soloway

#43. The ditties blend Japanese popular culture themes of saccharine, childlike goodness and viciously detached sadism, which Aum drew upon as it tapped the barely suppressed rage of the young against their society.

Robert Jay Lifton

#44. 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

#45. 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

#46. 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

#47. Popular culture is a contradiction in terms. If it's popular, it's not culture.

Vivienne Westwood

#48. 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

#49. There are some people who have helped to advance me and other girls, but the fashion industry is always behind popular culture. They think they understand the zeitgeist. They don't know anything about the zeitgeist.

Iman

#50. 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

#51. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in western popular culture, but in reality, our cynicism advances the desires of the powerful: cynicism is obedience.

Alex Steffen

#52. With a movie you're creating from the beginning this particular work, let's not call it work of art, because very few movies are works of art, let's just call them bits of popular culture, whatever they are, sometimes very rarely by accident a movie becomes a work of art.

Sydney Pollack

#53. I'm not interested in popular culture, particularly. I'm not against it, I'm not avoiding it, but I'm not interested in it as a force in life.

Joe Bradley

#54. At its best, cinema does retain a remarkable ability to speak to people of every age, from every background, and in ways that almost any other art form in popular culture struggles to compete with.

David Puttnam

#55. 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

#56. Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.

James Rosenquist

#57. I want to make movies that people see. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do.

Alden Ehrenreich

#58. Easy
to be delighted
or dismayed by POPULAR CULTURE
but then one has no other option and even
'God, it's so dreadful we watch it because it can't help
being funny' is
to be delighted.

Jennifer Clarvoe

#59. 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

#60. Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want.

Victor Davis Hanson

#61. But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you're
sharing a reality that doesn't exist.

Chuck Klosterman

#62. Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so ... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.

Haruki Murakami

#63. Popular culture is a place where pity is called compassion, flattery is called love, propaganda is called knowledge, tension is called peace, gossip is called news, and auto-tune is called singing.

Criss Jami

#64. One epoch's "popular culture" is another's esoterica.

Alfred Appel Jr.

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. Underachievement is widely accepted in the popular culture, which puts little value on persistence in the face of setbacks or on the unique pleasure of working long and hard on something personally important.

Kenneth W. Christian

#68. I maintain that Western popular culture at its best is worthy of respect and should be cherished as much as the operas of Wagner.

Ibn Warraq

#69. With his passing, Dick Clark deserves to take his place at the top in the pantheon of popular culture icons.

John Oates

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

David Brinkley

#71. I myself wouldn't want to read a magazine that focuses solely on a small part of the literary field or of the popular culture - better to smash the borders and look for interesting and important stuff from many different forms of storytelling.

Toni Jerrman

#72. Michael Jackson will always be my favorite pop musician; he was for years and years until his death, which was horrible to me. So I like pop culture. But to me, even if it's popular, there is a quality in the music you have to be able to appreciate.

Michel Gondry

#73. Popular culture has become engorged, broadening and thickening until it's the only culture anyone notices.

P. J. O'Rourke

#74. Under popular culture's obsession with a naive inclusion, everything is O.K.

Stanley Crouch

#75. What I like about popular culture is its accessibility, and I've covered popular songs because they are amazing things.

Robert Wyatt

#76. There's much talk in popular culture about finding
happiness - as though if you aren't grinning ear to
ear 24 hours a day you're somehow missing out on
life.

Rachel C. Weingarten

#77. I gave up my base in popular culture when I left the Tonight Show.

Branford Marsalis

#78. 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

#79. And it's not only films, I'm pretty unaware of anything that's going on in popular culture right now.

Brad Bird

#80. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do. So I really want to be a part of those movies that say something good to a lot of people.

Alden Ehrenreich

#81. I still think there's a big part of the population that has a lot of misinformation about sharks. But I think it's beginning to change a little bit. As good information about sharks permeates popular culture, things may start to change.

Brian Skerry

#82. I love the idea of the amateur - that's what popular culture is all about. But what the Internet's doing is professionalizing everyone's amateuristic impulses.

Lee Siegel

#83. I think angels definitely offer all the imaginative possibilities that vampires do, and I think they've actually been popular in Western culture for longer than vampires have been. I hope they become a part of the culture again in a new way.

Danielle Trussoni

#84. Complexity and profundity have been equated by the academic culture just as fame and significance have been conflated by the popular culture. Fame and significance have nothing to do with one another; and complexity and profundity have nothing to do with one another.

Dennis Prager

#85. Judeo-Christians have got to respect the pagan truth shown in the popular culture of sex and violence. It's meaningful about the elemental forces of life, the brutality of life and nature.

Camille Paglia

#86. When I look at certain aspects of popular culture - not everything because I like a lot of things - sometimes my heart breaks a little bit, just a little bit. I begin to ponder what happened to this generation, I don't know.

Saul Williams

#87. 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

#88. 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

#89. Avoiding maturity is, for many men, not just a cute hobby, but a life's work - often handsomely rewarded in the infantile popular culture of the West.

Michael Leunig

#90. I am saying that while popular culture usually portrays practitioners of magic as separate from ordinary people, often biologically different, many people have habits or customs or superstitions that show magic was once a whole lot more democratic.

David Liss

#91. The Guy Fawkes mask has now become a common brand and a convenient placard to use in protest against tyranny - and I'm happy with people using it; it seems quite unique, an icon of popular culture being used this way.

David Lloyd

#92. Brands and branding are the most significant gifts that commerce has ever made to popular culture. Branding has moved so far beyond its commercial origins that its impact is virtually immeasurable in social and cultural terms.

Wally Olins

#93. Fashion is simply a guideline for style-less people to appear stylish.

Criss Jami

#94. Science is too important not to be a part of popular culture.

Brian Cox

#95. Women are in many ways second-class citizens in the United States in 2016, because of the way that we're portrayed in popular culture.

Geena Davis

#96. I'm somebody who's really contributed to culture. Popular culture.

Steve Guttenberg

#97. I worry about the culture of celebrity in this country. Personality over performance. Fashion before form. For the popular culture it makes interesting fare, but I think in the long-term the negative consequences are enormous.

B.R. Snow

#98. 'Hollywood Don't Surf!' is really about how Hollywood's superficial view of surfing culture has influenced popular culture and the story of what happened when real surfers tried to change that.

Greg MacGillivray

#99. One of my key realizations about happiness, and a point oddly under-emphasized by positive psychologists, given its emphasis in popular culture, is that outer order contributes to inner calm. More than it should.

Gretchen Rubin

#100. The popular culture gives us books that offer entertainment but no ideas. High culture gives us books that offer ideas but no entertainment. The best books manage to do both.

Gene Edward Veith Jr.