Pop 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

songs, to me, were more important than just light entertainment. They were my preceptor and guide into some altered consciousness of reality. Some different republic, some liberated republic... whatever the case, it wasn't that I was anti-popular culture or anything and I had no ambition to stir things up. I just thought of mainstream culture as lame as hell and a big trick. It was like the unbroken sea of frost that lay outside the window and you had to have awkward footgear to walk with.

~ Bob Dylan

We awaken by asking the right questions. We awaken when we see knowledge being spread that goes against our own personal experiences. We awaken when we see popular opinion being wrong but accepted as being right, and what is right being pushed as being wrong. We awaken by seeking answers in corners that are not popular. And we awaken by turning on the light inside when everything outside feels dark.

~ Suzy Kassem

A conscious human is driven by their conscience, not popular opinion.

~ Suzy Kassem

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

FRUITS AND NUTSKeep jumping around them like monkeys.The clones,Commercialized zombies,And the TV junkies.Keep throwing berries,Twigs,And nuts at them.Until they wake upTo see what's up And figure out whyWe're laughing at 'em.

~ Suzy Kassem

I love pop culture -- the Rolling Stones, the Doors, David Lynch, things like that. That's why I said I don't like elitism.

~ Haruki Murakami

For those whose ganglia were formed pre-TV, the mimetic deployment of pop-culture icons seems at best an annoying tic and at worst a dangerous vapidity that compromises fiction's seriousness by dating it out of the Platonic Always, where it ought to reside.

~ Jonathan Lethem

Understanding knowledge as an essential element of love is vital because we are bombarded daily with messages that tell us love is about mystery, about that which cannot be known. We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message is received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge. These messages are brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction.

~ Bell Hooks

Pure wisdom is the 'fruit of life' banal platitudes are the 'bane of existence'.

~ Criss Jami

On the whole I try to keep Modesty and Willie in timeless settings, which is why I avoid all the latest slang and in-words. It won't be long before 'brill' sounds as dated as 'super' does now. [Uncle Happy, 1990]

~ Peter O'donnell

It is not merely the feeling that something is familiar. It is one step beyond that. It is something new, challenging, or surprising that opens a door into a feeling of comfort, meaning, or familiarity. It is called an aesthetic aha.

~ Derek Thompson

In the last 10 years, we have seen a rise in selfishness: selfies, self-absorbed people, superficiality, self-degradation, apathy, and self-destruction. So I challenge all of you to take initiative to change this programming. Instead of celebrating the ego, let's flip the script and celebrate the heart. Let's put the ego and celebrity culture to sleep, and awaken the conscience. This is the battle we must all fight together to win back our humanity. To save our future and our children.

~ Suzy Kassem

Most of the time, we see only what we want to see, or what others tell us to see, instead of really investigate to see what is really there. We embrace illusions only because we are presented with the illusion that they are embraced by the majority. When in truth, they only become popular because they are pounded at us by the media with such an intensity and high level of repetition that its mere force disguises lies and truths. And like obedient schoolchildren, we do not question their validity and swallow everything up like medicine. Why? Because since the earliest days of our youth, we have been conditioned to accept that the direction of the herd, and authority anywhere — is always right.

~ Suzy Kassem

I blame Doctor Who. Mr Spock. The Scooby Gang: both the ones in the Mystery Machine and the ones with the stakes. I've spent my life with stories of people who don't walk away, who go back for their friends, who make that last stand. I've been brainwashed by Samwise Gamgee.

~ Andrea K. Höst

It appears that countless women born between the years of 1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack. I cannot fathom how he isn't the number-one box office star in America, because every straight girl I know would seel her soul to share a milkshake with that motherfucker.

~ Chuck Klosterman

...you need the tiniest bit of bravery. People get scared when you try to do something, especially when it looks like you're succeeding. People do not get scared when you are failing. It calms them. That's why the show Intervention is a hit and everyone loves worrying about Amanda Bynes.

~ Mindy Kaling

Everybody was sorta going to sleep twards the end of 1983, and I felt that they had to be woken up!

~ Morrissey

Pop is about speaking everybody's language. The imagery and iconography we instantly recognize. When you can rely on things that the public already knows, you're dealing with Pop.

~ Nuno Roque

popular culture is where we go to talk to and agree with one another; to simplify ourselves; to find our herd. It’s like going to the Automat to buy an emotion. The thrills are cheap and the payoffs predictable and, after a while, the repetition is a bummer. Whereas books are where we go alone to complicate ourselves. Inside this solitude, we take on contours, textures, perspectives. Heightened language levitates the reader. Great art transfigures. And when we go back to it, it’s full of even more surprises. We get older; it gets smarter.

~ John Leonard

Two people, two hands, and two songs, in this case Big Shot and Bette Davis Eyes. The lyrics of the two songs provided no commentary, honest or ironic, on the proceedings. They were merely there and always underfoot, the insistent gray muck that was pop culture. It stuck to our shoes and we tracked it through our lives.

~ Colson Whitehead

Imagine America as one house on a suburban lane. Years before he became a Jehovah's Witness, Prince knocked on America's door through his music. He came to the door holding a guitar and an umbrella while concealing a Bible. He flirted his way inside the door and told us he had a dirty mind and was controversial, and then he sat down in the living room on the good couch. And, when America's guard was down, because we thought we were having a conversation about sex, Prince eased out his Bible and said, Let me also tell you about my Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ.

~ Touré

I want my rockstars dead.

~ Bill Hicks

Every category has its snobs: music, books, movies. There are so many things a man is only pressured into liking or disliking.

~ Criss Jami

I think the skin revolution for women, I will call it, really all started with Mariah Carey. Madonna was pretty risqué too, but she was pretty much always known as a bad girl. Mariah was a good girl, supposedly Christian, turning very bad, in the late 90's. So then, all the other little girls and teens and women across America thought it would be ok for them to come out too essentially, or flaunt whatever they had. Modesty went completely out the window for many women, starting in the late 90's.

~ Lisa Bedrick

In a certain light, feminism is just the long, slow realization that the stuff you love hates you

~ Lindy West

The dominant myth of the day seemed to be that anybody could do anything, even go to the moon. You could do whatever you wanted -in the ads and in the articles, ignore your limitations, defy them. If you were an indecisive person, you could become a leader and wear lederhosen. If you were a housewife, you could become a glamour girl with rhinestone sunglasses. Are you slow witted? No worries -you can be an intellectual genius. If you're old, you can be young. Anything was possible. It was almost like a war against the self.

~ Bob Dylan

This has suggested to some that the very structure of human thought is oppositional-that is to say, rational and associative, rather than linear and categorical.

~ Marcel Danesi

In keeping with your policy of bringing Pollution the latest in death and violence, and in living colour, there’s going to be something entirely different… death without remediation.

~ Rebecca Mcnutt

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

~ Criss Jami

The Professor noted two nymphs with strawberries on their heads, a DayGlo Amish lady, a mustachioed man in a rainbow apron. He wrote Saturday Night Fever, then crossed it out and wrote Drag Ball + Bollywood and underlined it twice.

~ La Carmina

I have a transgressive spirit, and Pop is transgression's best friend.

~ Nuno Roque

The danger of restorative nostalgia lies in its belief that the mutilated 'wholeness' of the body politic can be repaired. But the reflective nostalgic understands deep down that loss is irrecoverable: Time wounds all wholes. To exist in Time is to suffer through an endless exile, a successive severing from those precious few moments of feeling at home in the world. In pop terms, Morrissey is the supreme poet of reflective nostalgia.

~ Simon Reynolds

Hey, I said we don't carry weapons, I didn't say we couldn't defend ourselves. Captain Stanley Memphis, head of alien team disguised as pint-sized critters on a quest to learn if humans are savage bastards or a benevolent tribe.

~ Delilah Jean Williams

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

We build this country ourselves every day and we have to be, in the most positive sense, totally unreal.

~ J.c. Villamere

The young are often savvy in the cultural world but not so much the intellectual, the old the intellectual but not so much the cultural. But I tell you those who do the most damage during an era are very much aware of both.

~ Criss Jami

Girl, we need to get you on a study program, fast. You're not going to last a week around here if you can't keep up with the pop culture references. How about Lord of the Rings? Firefly? Doctor Horrible? No? Clearly we have a lot of work to do.

~ Rachel Caine

It's the only way anything will change. Because we are both mother and child, cause and effect, villain and victim

~ Jason Najum

So this needs to be said, and so I will try to say it

~ Jason Najum