Popular Culture Quotes

“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, Killosophy

“Constantly exposing yourself to popular culture and the mass media will ultimately shape your reality tunnel in ways that are not necessarily conducive to achieving your Soul Purpose and Life Calling. Modern society has generally ‘lost the plot’. Slavishly following its false gods and idols makes no sense in a spiritually aware life.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can't make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society without causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.”
― Theodore J. Kaczynski, Industrial Society and Its Future

“Give the People what they want - and they'll get what they deserve.”
― The Kinks

“…Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I don't know what will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity. We're more popular than Jesus now. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.”
― John Lennon

“Women's liberation is one thing, but the permeation of anti-male sentiment in post-modern popular culture - from our mocking sitcom plots to degrading commercial story lines - stands testament to the ignorance of society. Fair or not, as the lead gender that never requested such a role, the historical male reputation is quite balanced.

For all of their perceived wrongs, over centuries they've moved entire civilizations forward, nurtured the human quest for discovery and industry, and led humankind from inconvenient darkness to convenient modernity. Navigating the chessboard that is human existence is quite a feat, yet one rarely acknowledged in modern academia or media. And yet for those monumental achievements, I love and admire the balanced creation that is man for all his strengths and weaknesses, his gifts and his curses. I would venture to say that most wise women do.”
― Tiffany Madison

“Tie me up, please..." Chantal said. They looked above at some vines and roots hanging down from the grassy area above the depression in the canal they were standing in. She was in his hands—he had to comply.

A little bit of kink was one of the most delicious of erotic pleasures. Catholic school girls were often the horniest—Brett could hardly contain his elation.”
― Jess C Scott, Catholic School Girls Rule

“A conscious human is driven by their conscience, not popular opinion.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“She felt the cold blast from the sterile air conditioning on her bare arms and thighs, as she ambled down the center of the shopping complex's ground floor.

The scene was a swirl of candy bright lights--the Victoria's Secret fuchsia signboard, signboards which lured one to purchase "confidence," or "sexual appeal," or whatever it was that was being advertised--the fluorescent lights in each store, contrasting with the shiny, black-tiled walls and eye-catching speckled marble tiles on the ground.

One could lick the floor--the tiles were spotless, clean like the fake air she was breathing in, like the atoms and cells in her that were decaying in stale neglect.”
― Jess C Scott, Jack in the Box

“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

“Adrian had always found it amusing that a guy could be drilling Stacia up her ass while she considered herself to be a virgin. Her intent had been to present herself as such when she found "Mr. Right.”
― Jess C Scott, Master & Servant

“He felt a little lost, after that experience. Lost as the girls on their knees. It was a never-ending story of young girls losing themselves, such that they were no longer humans with any souls or characters, but pretty girls with fat asses and nice tits.”
― Jess C Scott, Take-Out, Part 1

“He knows how to market himself well. Nowadays, that's all that seems to count. He's rebellious in a way that appeals to people with vain, shallow taste. So of course he manipulates his audiences with the blessing of his recording company and the financial investors behind his brand.”
― Jess C. Scott, Sven

“Alice is fictional. This isn't.”
― Jess C. Scott, Zombie Mania: A Zombie Apocalypse Parody

“As individuals die every moment, how insensitive and fabricated a love it is to set aside a day from selfish routine in prideful, patriotic commemoration of tragedy. Just as God is provoked by those who tithe simply because they feel that they must tithe, I am provoked by those who commemorate simply because they feel that they must commemorate.”
― Criss Jami, Killosophy

“There is a huge trapdoor waiting to open under anyone who is critical of so-called 'popular culture' or (to redefine this subject) anyone who is uneasy about the systematic, massified cretinization of the major media. If you denounce the excess coverage, you are yourself adding to the excess. If you show even a slight knowledge of the topic, you betray an interest in something that you wish to denounce as unimportant or irrelevant. Some writers try to have this both ways, by making their columns both 'relevant' and 'contemporary' while still manifesting their self-evident superiority. Thus—I paraphrase only slightly—'Even as we all obsess about Paris Hilton, the people of Darfur continue to die.' A pundit like (say) Bob Herbert would be utterly lost if he could not pull off such an apparently pleasing and brilliant 'irony.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Popular culture is one of the sites where this struggle for and against a culture of the powerful is engaged: it is the stake to be won or lost in that struggle. It is the arena of consent and resistance. It is partly where hegemony arises, and where it is secured. It is not a sphere where socialism, a socialist culture - already fully formed - might be simply "expressed". But it is one of the places where socialism might be constituted. That is why "popular culture" matters. Otherwise, to tell you the truth, I don't give a damn about it.”
― Stuart Hall, People's History and Socialist Theory

“They were unironic enthusiasts for all the mass pleasures the culture offered: television, NASCAR, cruises, Disney World, sports, celebrity gossip, and local politics. Szabo often wished that he could be as well adjusted as Melinda's family, but he would have had to be medicated to pursue her list of pleasures.”
― Thomas McGuane

“Nothing is more dead and dated than the book which once caused controversy.”
― Alec Waugh

“Today it is the elites...those who control the international flow of money and information, preside over philanthropic foundations and institutions of higher learning, manage the instruments of cultural production and thus set the terms of public debate--that have lost faith in the values, or what remains of them, of the West.”
― Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy

“Separating the art from the artist is hard to do when the art is so interconnected with who the artist is as a person.”
― Dominique Davis, Living Rent Free In My Head: Essays On Pop Culture

“Everything trending was once not trending. And everything not trending, give it time.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“No fashion or trend is ever outdated, because in due time, it will find its way back.”
― John Joclebs Bassey, Night of a Thousand Thoughts

“In the days before culture shifted centre-stage, there was an obvious dwelling place for the spirit, known as religion. Religion did all that culture was later to do, but far more effectively. It could enlist countless millions of men and women in the business of ultimate values, not just the few well-educated enough to read Horace or listen to Mahler. To assist it in this task, it had the threat of hell fire at its disposal - a penalty which proved rather more persuasive than the murmurs of cultivated distaste around those who hadn't read Horace. Religion has been for most of human history one of the most precious components of popular life, even though almost all theorists of popular culture embarrassingly ignore it.”
― Terry Eagleton, After Theory

“Ironically, for all that youth culture rejects classical music as old-fashioned and out-ofdate, it is the way it is because of an excess of rational thought; it is, literally, too modern. Instead, youth culture yearns for a prerational immediacy, that of the body, of libidinal energy, and for the luxury of blind, adolescent emotions without consequences or responsibilities. Ironic, too, is that popular culture presents a prerational consciousness as the absolutely modern.”
― Julian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music?: Cultural Choice and Musical Value

“Instant popularity vanishes just as instantly.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Vande Vasudhaivam: 100 Sonnets for Our Planetary Pueblo

“[Popular Culture is] the site of struggle between the ‘resistance’ of subordinate groups in society and the forces of ‘incorporation’ operating in the interests of dominant groups in society”
― John Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: An Introduction

“This book is written for all those who loved Charlie and the Chocolate Factory when they were young, and those who love it now. It's for anyone who wants to know a bit more about how it came to be, how it managed to permeate readers' worlds and the world at large, and how it has endured so happily for fifty years - and counting.”
― Lucy Mangan, Inside Charlie's Chocolate Factory: The Complete Story of Willy Wonka, the Golden Ticket, and Roald Dahl's Most Famous Creation.

“In interviews, McMurtry frequently mentioned that whenever he wrote a novel now, he paused to consider which young bankable actors could play his characters in a movie, and if he could think of none, he would change his characters to fit Hollywood's realities. Such comments sounded like further attempts to disabuse his readers from clinging to nostalgic notions of the Novel as High Art.”
― Tracy Daugherty, Larry McMurtry: A Life

“It is almost as difficult for a Scots intellectual to get out of the Kailyard as to live without an alias. The dilemma is not just an intellectual's one... the whole thing is related to the much larger field of popular culture. For Kailyard is popular in Scotland. It is recognisably intertwined with that prodigious array of Kitsch symbols, slogans, banners, war-cries, knick-knacks, music-hall heroes, icons, conventional sayings and sentiments (not a few of them 'pithy') which have for so long defended the name of 'Scotland' to the world. Annie S. Swan and A.J. Cronin provided no more than the decent outer garb for this vast tartan monster. In their work the thing trots along doucely enough, on a lead. But it is something else to be with it (e.g.) in a London pub on International night, or in the crowd at the annual Military Tattoo in front of Edinburgh Castle. How intolerably vulgar! What unbearable, crass, mindless philistinism! One knows that Kitsch is a large constituent of mass popular culture in every land: but this is ridiculous!”
― Tom Nairn, The Break Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism