Popular Culture Quotes

• The lowest form of popular culture - lack of information, misinformation, disinformation, and a contempt for the truth or the reality of most people's lives - has overrun real journalism.

  Carl Bernstein

  Real, People, Ordinary

  "Biography / Personal Quotes". www.imdb.com.

  48 Copy quote

  Show source

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

  James Wolcott

  Night, Vampire, Dawn

  12 Copy quote

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

  Morley Safer

  Reality, Popular Song, Culture

  55 Copy quote

• If there are signs that Americans bow to the gods of advertising, there are equally indications that people find the gods ridiculous. It is part of the popular culture that advertisements are silly.

  Michael Schudson

  Silly, People, Culture

  Michael Schudson (2013). “Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion (RLE Advertising): Its Dubious Impact on American Society”, p.242, Routledge

  12 Copy quote

  Show source

• You can't handle the truth!

  Jack Nicholson

  Movie, Memorable, Great Year

  9 Copy quote

• May the Force be with you.

  George Lucas

  Movie, Film History, Psychics

  Star Wars (motion picture) (1977)

  84 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.

  Mario Puzo

  Movie, Hollywood Films, Film History

  The Godfather ch. 1 (1969)

  15 Copy quote

  Show source

• I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse.

  Marlon Brando

  Movie, Film History, Hollywood Films

  "Fictional character: Don Vito Corleone". "The Godfather", www.imdb.com. March 14, 1972.

  59 Copy quote

  Show source

• Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn.

  Clark Gable

  Movie, Badass, Wind

  "Fictional character: Rhett Butler". "Gone with the Wind", 1939.

  135 Copy quote

  Show source

• Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

  John Podhoretz

  Reflection, Culture, Causes

  42 Copy quote

• Today, ordinary Americans are being stuffed with garbage.

  Carl Bernstein

  Ordinary, Today, Garbage

  "An A-Z of cultural terms". The Guardian, June 3, 1992.

  8 Copy quote

  Show source

• Popular culture is the new Babylon, into which so much art and intellect now flow. It is our imperial sex theater, supreme temple of the western eye. We live in the age of idols. The pagan past, never dead, flames again in our mystic hierarchies of stardom.

  Camille Paglia

  Art, Sex, Eye

  Camille Paglia (1990). “Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson”, Vintage

  2 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Race, Talking, Class

  33 Copy quote

• We will never know the extent of the damage movies are doing to us, but movie art, it appears, thrives on moral chaos. When the country is paralyzed, the popular culture may tell us why. After innocence, winners become losers. Movies are probably inuring us to corruption; the sellout is the hero-survivor for our times.

  Pauline Kael

  Country, Art, Hero

  Pauline Kael (1994). “For keeps”, E P Dutton

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• Popular culture as a whole is popular, but in today's fragmented market it's a jostle of competing unpopular popular cultures. As the critic Stanley Crouch likes to say, if you make a movie and 10 million people go see it, you'll gross $100 million - and 96 per cent of the population won't have to be involved. That alone should caution anyone about reading too much into individual examples of popular culture.

  Mark Steyn

  Reading, People, Example

  7 Copy quote

• The popular culture still ridicules religion and often treats it like the plague.

  Gary Bauer

  Christian, Religious, Culture

  Gary Bauer (1992). “Our Journey Home: What Parents Are Doing to Preserve Family Values”, W Publishing Group

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• The distortions and insults about organized religion will continue unabated as long as our popular culture continues its overall campaign against judgment and values. A war against standards leads logically and inevitably to hostility to religion because it is religious faith that provides the ultimate basis for all standards.

  Michael Medved

  Christian, Religious, War

  8 Copy quote

• The exclusion of true esoteric religion has been the business of the State since ancient times. At first this was done via the establishment of the popular idealism of exoteric religious institutions in league with the State. But in modern times the same process is done by the strategic exclusion of conventional religious cultism, mystical idealism, and higher evolutionary Wisdom from the mechanisms of popular culture.

  Adi Da

  Religious, League, Done

  Adi Da Samraj (1980). “Scientific proof of the existence of God will soon be announced by the White House!: prophetic wisdom about the myths and idols of mass culture and popular religious cultism, the new priesthood of scientific and political materialism, and the secrets of enlightenment hidden in the body of man”, Dawn Horse Pr

  14 Copy quote

  Show source

• In spite of their obvious differences, folk art and popular art have much in common; they are easy to understand, they are romantic, patriotic, conventionally moral, and they are held in deep affection by those who are suspicious of the great arts. Popular artists can be serious, like Frederick Remington, or trivial, like Charles Dana Gibson; they can be men of genius like Chaplin or men of talent like Harold Lloyd; they can be as uni versal as Dickens or as parochial as E.P. Roe; one thing common to all of them is the power to communicate directly with everyone.

  Gilbert Seldes

  Art, Patriotic, Men

  0 Copy quote

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

  Mason Cooley

  Passion, Secret Love, Culture

  0 Copy quote

• Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.

  Mason Cooley

  Seductive, Culture

  1 Copy quote

• 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

  Self, Knowing, Cameras

  "Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, and Edgar Wright of Hot Fuzz". Interview with Keith Phipps, film.avclub.com. April 18, 2007.

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• This idea of popular culture became something that belonged to us rather than something that we looked at from far away. We realized we could be part of it and create it, instead of just being consumers only.

  Simon Pegg

  Ideas, Culture, Just Being

  "Nick Frost, Simon Pegg, and Edgar Wright of Hot Fuzz". Interview with Keith Phipps, film.avclub.com. April 18, 2007.

  2 Copy quote

  Show source

• 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

  Children, Kids, Theatre

  Interview with Steve Bell, www.theguardian.com. March 18, 2005.

  0 Copy quote

  Show source

• When artists and philosophers talk only amongst themselves, they ignore the potential of popular culture to become a variety of dialogues with and between everyday people. Its discourse may be productive of desire and pleasure, but popular culture is also a language in which people discuss politics, religion, ethics, and action.

  Brenda Laurel

  Artist, People, Everyday

  Brenda Laurel (2001). “Utopian Entrepreneur”, p.11, MIT Press

  0 Copy quote

  Show source