Quotes & Sayings About Fads

As a recording engineer - someone who is deeply embroiled in the process of making records every day - you see trends and fads run through the social organization of the population of musicians in the same way that they would run through a high school. — Steve Albini

Those of us who have the duty of training the rising generation of doctors ... must not inseminate the virgin minds of the young with the tares of our own fads. It is for this reason that it is easily possible for teaching to be too 'up to date'. It is always well, before handing the cup of knowledge to the young, to wait until the froth has settled. — Sir Robert Hutchison, 1st Baronet

I'm a voracious reader, and I like to explore all sorts of writing without prejudice and without paying any attention to labels, conventions or silly critical fads. — Carlos Ruiz Zafon

I think it's very important to really find the wheat amidst the chafe and not give into superficialities, to not get caught up the commercialism or the fads, you know, the "over-popularization" of some things that we might see today. That doesn't mean we have to throw out the Buddha with the bath water, it's not all bad. — Surya Das

The fad diets that many Americans are on are perfect if you want to be hungry all the time and miserable. — Nathan Pritikin

The common idea that scientists reject a theory as soon as it leads to a contradiction is just not so. When they get something that works at all they plunge ahead with it and ignore its weak spots ... scientists are just as bad as the rest of the public in following fads and being influenced by mass enthusiasm. — Vannevar Bush

Miniskirts have become quite a fad. They're even some guys wearing them. Don't laugh, if you had thought to of that, you'd not be here now. — Bob Hope

Behind innocence there gathers a clotted mass of superstition, of twisted and misdirected impulse; clandestine flirtation, fads, and ragtime fill the unventilated mind. — Walter Lippmann

If we apply our minds directly and competently to the needs of the earth, then we will have begun to make fundamental and necessary changes in our minds. We will begin to understand and to mistrust and to change our wasteful economy, which markets not just the produce of the earth, but also the earth's ability to produce. We will see that beauty and utility are alike dependent upon the health of the world. But we will also see through the fads and the fashions of protest. We will see that war and oppression and pollution are not separate issues, but are aspects of the same issue. Amid the outcries for the liberation of this group or that, we will know that no person is free except in the freedom of other persons, and that man's only real freedom is to know and faithfully occupy his place - a much humbler place than we have been taught to think - in the order of creation.
(pg.89, "Think Little") — Wendell Berry

The most adorable thing about Toronto is that she remains fiercely aloof and indifferent to the fads and entrepreneurial fevers of her lovers. She is intractably herself, admissive to the most vagrant, sober in a way that gets misinterpreted as stodginess. Her generosity extends to the meek as well as the gold diggers. Mercifully, she doesn't give a hoot about our portraits of her, but just waits, patiently, for our affection and citizenship. — Pier Giorgio Di Cicco

The New England divine Cotton Mather puts it this way: "Exhibit as much as you can of a glorious Christ. Yea, let the motto upon your whole ministry be: Christ is all. Let others develop the pulpit fads that come and go. Let us specialize in preaching our Lord Jesus Christ. — Joel R. Beeke

Metallica lives in a little bubble. We just do our own thing. We're not part of any trends or waves or fads. We can just do our own thing, all the time. It's a great luxury. I don't think we were really appreciative of it until recently, and really understood that it is what keeps us alive. It's great to be able to have the freedom to run around and do all this crazy stuff, and at all cost, avoid making another record, just to piss our managers off. — Lars Ulrich

Look at it this way: Psychoanalysis is a permanent fad. — Peter De Vries

Every session I had no fewer than sixteen girls with "allergies" to dairy and wheat - cheese and bread basically - but also to garlic, eggplant, corn, and nuts. They had cleverly developed "allergies," I believe, to the foods they had seen their own mothers fearing and loathing as diet fads passed through their homes. I could've strangled their mothers for saddling these girls with the idea that food is an enemy - some of them only eight years old and already weird about wanting a piece of bread - and I would've liked to bludgeon them, too, for forcing me to participate in their young daughters' fucked-up relationship with food. — Gabrielle Hamilton

I've never done a trendy diet or subscribed to a fashionable health fad in my life. — Matthew Hussey

Singleton has an almost uncanny ability to resist being caught up in the fads and fancies of the moment. Like most great innovators [and investors! - Ed.], Henry Singleton is supremely indifferent to criticism. — Robert J. Flaherty

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity). — William F. Buckley Jr.

Anyone who says rock 'n' roll is a passing fad or a flash-in-the-pan trend along the music road has rocks in the head. — Alan Freed

I have even seen the writings suggesting that I am playing a deep game, that I am using the present turmoil to foist my fads on India, and am making religious experiments at India's expense. I can only answer that Satyagraha is made of sterner stuff. There is nothing reserved and nothing secret in it. — Mahatma Gandhi

Barbie's one of those fads whose popularity makes you lose all faith in the human race. — Connie Willis

The doctors are always changing their opinions. They always have some new fad. — David Lloyd George

Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried and dared ... Photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it was achieved. — Bill Brandt

It is always simple to fall; there are an infinity of angles at which one falls, only one at which one stands. To have fallen into any one of the fads from Gnosticism to Christian Science would indeed have been obvious and tame. But to have avoided them all has been one whirling adventure; and in my vision the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild truth reeling but erect. — G.K. Chesterton

It's the latest trendy thinking by the Ministry of Justice ... Restorative justice is a fad. — Douglas Carswell

European democracy was originally imbued with a sense of Christian responsibility and self-discipline, but these spiritual principles have been gradually losing their force. Spiritual independence is being pressured on all sides by the dictatorship of self-satisfied vulgarity, of the latest fads, and of group interests. — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

My search for ways to improve my touch has never ended. We players tried a lot of different things and compared notes. Little fads would set in. — Arnold Palmer

You shouldn't be looking for the secret to making people follow fads, you should be looking for the secret to making them think for themselves. Because that's what science is all about. — Connie Willis

Like almost all of Beefheart's recorded work, [Trout Mask Replica] was not even "ahead" of its time in 1969. Then and now, it stands outside time, trends, fads, hypes, the rise and fall of whole genres eclectic as walking Christmas trees, constituting a genre unto itself: truly, a musical Monolith if ever there was one. — Lester Bangs

Publicly, they claim to be thrilled to have the opportunity to engage directly with their customers; privately, they suspect, maybe even fervently hope, that Facebook and its spawn are fads. — Gary Vaynerchuk

Change bothers me. I don't cope too well with fashions, fads and urban traffic lights. — Fennel Hudson

If I had a dime for every time I heard someone say that they're tired of a genre (zombies) because it's only a fad, I'd be rich. #DeadRising — Ace Antonio Hall

Caramels are only a fad. Chocolate is a permanent thing. — Milton S. Hershey

To me, songwriting is the backbone of Nashville. Looks can go, fads can go, but a good song lasts forever. — Alan Jackson

Whenever I'm interested in something, I know the timing's off, because I'm always interested in the right thing at the wrong time. I should just be getting interested after I'm not interested any more. — Andy Warhol

There are fads ion science, just as there are fads in clothes — Fulton J. Sheen

I believe in a kind of fidelity to your own early ideas; it's a kind of antagonism in me to prevailing fads. — Grace Paley

God knows I am not too hippy. Perhaps because I am too much around the hip and I fear fads for, like anybody else, I like something that tends to last. — Charles Bukowski

Day to day, I love eating soup and salad; lots of stews, fish, chicken, meat and veg. I eat everything, and I don't have any fads. — Jerry Hall

20 years, we have experienced three unanticipated fads partly precipitated by DSM-IV: a 20-fold increase in Autism Spectrum Disorder,7 a tripling of Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD),8 and a doubling of Bipolar Disorders.9 The most dangerous fad is a 40-fold increase in childhood Bipolar Disorders,10 stimulated, not by DSM-IV, but instead by reckless and misleading drug company marketing. Twenty percent of the U.S. population11 is taking a psychotropic drug; 7% is addicted to one; and overdoses with legal drugs now cause more emergency room visits than overdoses with illegal drugs. — Allen Frances

We're very good in America at talking about stuff, often stuff to buy. We tend to talk about our iPods. We tend to talk about cars or new fads. — Milton Glaser

The trendy management fads concentrate on antecedents, .. but the only thing that makes what you do (before a behavior) effective is its consistent pairing with a consequence. Antecedents get us going. Consequences keep us going. — Aubrey Daniels

Bureaucrats want bigger bureaus. Special interests are interested in whatever's special to them. These two groups bring great pressure to bear upon politicians who have another agenda yet:
to cater to the temporary whims and fads of the public and the press. — P. J. O'Rourke

In a modern world, increasingly filled with pop culture fads and gimmicks, Lisa Morton reveals much of the underbelly history and unknown facts regarding the biggest pop culture event in history-Halloween. Her sheer delight and well-researched enthusiasm in tackling many of the unrecognized aspects of this monstrous topic makes one wonder what we don't know about everything else that should be as commonplace to our psyche as a bag of candy. — Del Howison

Photography as a fad is well-nigh on its last legs, thanks principally to the bicycle craze. — Alfred Stieglitz

This basic problem of relevance-cum-subservience has been given an added twist in the modern world, where relevance has become not only hollow but fragile and short-lived. A wider range of choices, a deeper uncertainty of events, a more pressing need for new styles - all this makes for an accelerating turnover of issues, concerns and fads. Nothing tires like a trend or ages faster than a fashion. Today's bold headline is tomorrow's yellowing newsprint. Thus the relevance-hungry liberals achieve relevance, but their victory is Pyrrhic. It is precisely as they win that they lose. As they become relevant to one group or movement, they become irrelevant to another and find themselves rudely dismissed. Far from being in the avant-garde, Christian liberals trot smartly behind the times. Far from being genuinely new or radical, they catch up and announce their discoveries breathlessly, only to see the vanguard disappearing down the road on the trail of a different pursuit. — Os Guinness

When I buy clothes, I like to buy them in outfits so I know they go together. I like a very simple, natural style. I never like to be the attention getter; I like to come under the radar and be cool about my look, very classic and stylish. I'm not into fads. — Rena Sofer

The new fad thing that's going through America and around the world. It's called global warming. — Steve Stockman

R&B is not a fad; it's the truth. — Aretha Franklin

Down through the years certain fads of slang had come and gone, and their vestiges could be found in Janie's and Mabel's conversation, like mastodon bones in a swamp. — Dolores Hitchens

Dash it all, she's an actress! Don't take her so seriously. Actors don't have opinions, my dear chap, still less do actresses. They have moods. Fads. Poses. Twenty-four-hour passions. There's a lot wrong with the world, dammit. Actors are absolute suckers for dramatic solutions. For all I know, by the time you get her out there, she'll be Born Again! — John Le Carre

There's no reason that anything should ever become obsolete, whether it be VHS tapes, celluloid film, print books or even the previous versions of a computer operating system, as long as even just one person still wants them around. After all, one thing leads to another, old inventions are the basis for new ones, inventors and designers and scientists and hobbyists worked hard to create all these things, so don't they deserve some respect, enough not to have their ideas buried in the dust by the latest trends and fads? — Rebecca McNutt

Humans have a strong desire to be part of a group. That desire makes us susceptible to fads, fashions, and idea contagions. — Michael Mauboussin

When the fad changed from folk to rock, they didn't take along any good writers. — Mary Travers

Eagerly pursuing all the latest fads and trends cause he's a dedicated follower of fashion. — Ray Davies

Vegetarianism is always the product of scarcity, of religion, or of ideology, including nutritional fads and fashions. — Jeffrey Steingarten

Rock 'n' Roll is a combination of good ideas dried up by fads, terrible junk, hideous failings in taste and judgment, gullibility and manipulation, moments of unbelievable clarity and invention, pleasure, fun, vulgarity, excess, novelty and utter enervation. — Greil Marcus

Others try to remove guilt by shifting the standards of right and wrong in the name of cultural progression. One of the easiest ways to assuage guilt is to convince ourselves that our moral standards are impractical or outdated. Greed is not wrong; it's necessary in the good of ambition. Promoting ourselves is the only way to be successful. Lust is natural for contemporary men and women, and sex is expected regardless of marriage or gender. We attempt to remove our guilt by redefining right and wrong according to cultural fads. Yet guilt remains. No matter how hard — David Platt

Hollywood seems to succumb to fads. Well, action films do well. Give me violence. Give me a scene where there's a couple of car chases or shooting and stuff like that. They're forgetting the fact that there's a basic structure to a story that is essential to making it really broad and appealing. — Clint Eastwood

Out this way there was the lonely last pub, the Castle, which now had an angry chalkboard sign up that said "drinkers welcome" to indicate its dissatisfaction with other establishments' fads like pub quizzes, bands, food, and, presumably, conversation. — Paul Cornell

Of all the fads and foibles in the long history of human credulity, scientism in all its varied guises - from fanciful cosmology to evolutionary epistemology and ethics - seems among the more dangerous, both because it pretends to be something very different from what it really is and because it has been accorded widespread and uncritical adherence. Continued insistence on the universal competence of science will serve only to undermine the credibility of science as a whole. The ultimate outcome will be an increase of radical skepticism that questions the ability of science to address even the questions legitimately within its sphere of competence. One longs for a new Enlightenment to puncture the pretensions of this latest superstition.
[The folly of scientism] — Austin L. Hughes

Instant communication is not communication at all but merely a frantic, trivial, nerve-wracking bombardment of cliches, threats, fads, fashions, gibberish and advertising. — Edward Abbey

It was left to the Progressive movement in America (as to the Fabians in Britain) to promote eugenics, Prohibition, dietary fads, the compulsory sterilisation of those they deemed 'unfit', and preferential treatment in immigration law of 'Nordic' (and preferably Protestant) immigrants. — Markham Shaw Pyle

If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one. — Barry Commoner

[Airmail was] an impractical sort of fad, and had no place in the serious job of postal transportation. — Paul Henderson

Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were. — Bill Bryson

You go through these little phases and fads, and it never turns out the way you think it's going to turn out. — Will Sergeant

I believe in the power of music. To me, it isn't just a fad. This is a positive thing. — Eddie Vedder

She reverse engineered a startup based on market conditions, industry trends, and nascent investor fads. — Douglas Rushkoff

It seems to me a very real problem, to which I have never seen an answer even such as I shall attempt here, why a democracy should produce fads; and why, where there is so genuine a sense of human dignity, there should be so much of an impossible petty tyranny. — G.K. Chesterton

American education has been littered with failed fads and foolish ideas for the past century. — Diane Ravitch

No other style of preaching can so completely guarantee immunity from an indulgence in special crochets and fads. The Bible is an exceedingly broad book in its treatment of life and, he who successfully preaches through, even one small section of it, will find a variety of subjects and principles and lessons
so great a variety that if he is fair with all he will be saved from the error of over-emphasis and of neglecting certain broad tracts of truth. — F.B. Meyer

Town designers are responsible for the total life of the town far more surely than doctors are responsible for the individual lives of their patients--for much medical history is act of God, whereas almost all town planning history is, alas, act of man. And compared with this all the professional squabbles, all the statistics, all the traffic flow, all the architectural fads, do not matter a damn. — Ian Nairn

Above all, beware of compromises. I do not mean that you are to get into antagonism with anybody, but you have to hold on to your own principles in weal or woe and never adjust them to others' "fads" through the greed of getting supporters. Your Atman is the support of the universe - whose support do you stand in need of? — Swami Vivekananda

Recent fads in history and biography have increasingly exalted the aridity of chronology and fact, and have, with some valid reason, rejected romanticizing and the presumption of guessing at the inner thoughts of historical figures. Unfortunately, the result has largely been not to demythologize the past, but merely to dehumanize and depersonalize it. As Roger Mudd has pointed out, 'Too many of today's historians [and biographers] ... seem to have forgotten that the writing of history is a literary art. — Markham Shaw Pyle

Because economists go through a similar training and share a common method of analysis, they act very much like a guild. The models themselves may be the product of analysis, reflection, and observation, but practitioners' views about the real world develop much more heuristically, as a by-product of informal conversations and socialization among themselves. This kind of echo chamber easily produces overconfidence - in the received wisdom or the model of the day. Meanwhile, the guild mentality renders the profession insular and immune to outside criticism. The models may have problems, but only card-carrying members of the profession are allowed to say so. The objections of outsiders are discounted because they do not understand the models. The profession values smarts over judgment, being interesting over being right - so its fads and fashions do not always self-correct. — Dani Rodrik

In spite of food fads, fitness programs, and health concerns, we must never lose sight of a beautifully conceived meal. — Julia Child

I can't wait for the next fad though, and I predict it's going to be Pennsylvania dutch culture, very Amish. It's going to be bonnets and butter churns. — Janeane Garofalo

What color is a chameleon placed on a mirror?
...
The chameleon responding to its own shifting image is an apt analog of the human world of fashion. Taken as a whole, what are fads but the response of a hive mind to its own reflection?
In a 21st-century society wired into instantaneous networks, marketing is the mirror; the collective consumer is the chameleon. — Kevin Kelly

I have a feeling that demonstrations don't accomplish anything. That they become fads. I also feel that demonstrations wouldn't go on unless there is a TV camera. That part of it all is performance for the media. I didn't know whether they are completely honest. — Frank Capra

The architect of popular culture is none other than Satan. He is the chief designer and chief marketer, and he has been branding worldliness since the beginning of time. His methods are shifty and constantly in motion, changing fads and trends to keep the world running in circles, trying to keep up with the latest and greatest. — Billy Graham

The modern world is also fascinated by innovation but scornful to tradition. Like the Athenians in Paul's day, many people do nothing but get involved in the latest fads (Acts 17:21). People stand in line to purchase the latest gimmicks, and no sooner do they learn how to use them than the manufacturers declare the models obsolete. Innovation! Progress! — Warren W. Wiersbe

You need to write your own book, the book of your heart and not chase the fads. It truly has to be the story you want to tell, it needs that fire, your fire in it. Then enjoy the time pre-publication. It is time to learn all you can about your craft and the industry. It isn't a race. Finally listen to your work. I have text to voice software that reads the books to me. Listening I can hear things that I would miss on the page. — Liz Fenwick

He wants us to think for ourselves, without fear of ridicule or judgment. He wants us to make up our minds and ignore what the rest of the world is saying. Pay no attention to fads or fashions, and listen, always, to the voice of your innermost self. Learning who you are is your primary task. There are no mistakes in life, as far as Emerson's concerned, only lessons. Once you master one lesson, you move on to the next. And the only place you can learn is right now. In the everlasting present. — Mark Frost

Kelsoism is not accepted by modern scientific economics as a valid and fruitful analysis of the distribution of income but rather it is regarded as an amateurish and cranky fad. — Paul Samuelson

Good style - regardless of fads - means the thing that suits your body. — Natalie Dormer

Science goes through fads, and there are big ups and crashes. — Eric Betzig

We've had all the ebbs and flows of any real career. Trust me. We've been at the highest highs and pretty low lows. But that said, we always stay true to who we were. We didn't jump on fads and fashions. — Jon Bon Jovi

Education, like everything else, goes in fads, and has the normal human tendency to put up with something bad for just so long, and then rush to the other extreme. — Anthony Standen

During the last ten years or so, I've seen quite a lot of Gordon, selling off his land for him. You know Gordon. He goes for anything trendy, especially young people's fads. Goes all out for a while, until something else takes his attention. Disco dancing, anti-draft, cocaine, anti-nuke - he has his little fling at whatever is 'in.' Most of 'em seem kind of nasty to me, but then I'm a bourgeois flag-waver."

"He calls me a fascist," Helena said.

"Oh, sure. He'd call me one too, except that I'm an Oppressed Minority. I bother him because I don't behave the way his stereotype says I should. — Bob Leman

Bigotry is one of the oldest and ugliest of trends, so persistent it only counts as a fad because the target keeps changing: Huguenots, Koreans, homosexuals, Muslims, Tutsis, Jews, Quakers, wolves, Serbs, Salem housewives. Nearly every group, so long as it's small and different, has had a turn, and the pattern never changes - disapproval, isolation, demonization, persecution. Which was one of the reasons it'd be nice to find the switch that turned fads on. I'd like to turn that one off for good. — Connie Willis

Fit no stereotypes. Don't chase the latest management fads. The situation dictates which approach best accomplishes the team's mission. — Colin Powell

One of the foremost activities of the NSA's FAD, or Foreign Affairs Division, is to pressure or incentivize EU member states to change their laws to enable mass surveillance. — Edward Snowden

Social media is not a fad because it's human. — Gary Vaynerchuk

Feminism is not a fad. It's not like Angry Birds. Although it does involve a lot of angry birds. Bad example. — Bridget Christie

At the time we acquired Viacom, everyone said I had overpaid. But even at today's depressed prices, that investment is worth billions. Everyone was saying MTV was a fad. I knew better. — Sumner Redstone

I loved buildings that had grown silently with the centuries, catching the best of each generation while time curbed the artist's pride and the philistine's vulgarity and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman. — Evelyn Waugh

Any one of the strange laws we suffer is a compromise between a fad and a vested interest. — Gilbert K. Chesterton

Marketing has long known how to exploit fads and how to develop trends. — Geoffrey Moore

Bitcoins are not an investment. They are an investment fad that someday could be a real digital currency, but if they continue to behave as they have, they will instead be nothing. — Kurt Eichenwald

Even the simplest things had a glorious pointlessness to them. When buttons came in, about 1650, people couldn't get enough of them and arrayed them in decorative profusion on the backs and collars and sleeves of coats, where they didn't actually do anything. One relic of this is the short row of pointless buttons that are still placed on the underside of jacket sleeves near the cuff. These have been purely decorative and have never had a purpose, yet 350 years later on we continue to attach them as if they are the most earnest necessity. — Bill Bryson