Quotes & Sayings About Pop Culture

I worked with Ismail Merchant on 'The Mystic Masseur,' I did 'Sakina's Restaurant,' I've done plays, I've been on Broadway, I've done movies, I've done TV ... but nothing has had the pop culture penetrative impact as 'The Daily Show' has. It's the nature of the beast. — Aasif Mandvi

The rift between culture and pop-culture has never been greater. — Dov Davidoff

Whether the Eisenhower administration has underestimated the American people's interest in space exploration or Truman never full appreciated MacArthur, the Soviet Union's Sputnik program has created a public spectacle that even Disney and von Braun might envy. — Ken Hollings

Don't lie to anyone, but particularly don't lie to millennials. They just know. They can smell it. Be yourself: if you're old, be old. If you don't know anything about pop culture, don't pretend to know anything about pop culture. When you credit teenagers with intelligence and emotional sophistication, they respond intelligently and with emotional sophistication. — John Green

How many actors have a shot at being a part of something that became a part of pop culture? It's been very rewarding. I'm not getting the 20 million bucks for the new movies, but at least I'm getting warmth and recognition from people wherever I go. — Adam West

Aaron Spelling always had his finger on the pulse of pop culture, he knew what the public wanted to see. He was one of the most loyal men in this business and believed in me at a time in my career when no one else would. My prayers are with his family. — Alyssa Milano

Most of the time, criticism that takes pop culture seriously involves performing some kind of symbolic analysis, decoding the work to demonstrate the way it represents some other aspect of society. — Steven Johnson

I love England and I love English culture, particularly English pop culture. — Zach Galligan

I didn't know anything about Opus Die except from pop culture, like Dan Brown novels, which I knew wasn't really knowing anything about Opus Die. — Wes Bentley

I guess my most prized pop culture possession is a signed first edition of the book 'Fight Club' by Chuck Palahniuk. — Jen Lancaster

If parents start to fear that monsters may have been let loose in their children's bedrooms, it may be because their children are the monsters. Consider what kind of world they are growing up in. It can all end tomorrow. Material progress no longer seems as closely meshed with human evolution as it once was; the anticipated leap into the future may not take place in a time or manner that can be so easily predicted. However, by now everyone from Richard Nixon to Chairman Mao knows that the only way to force the evolutionary curve to bend your way is by throwing larger numbers at it. — Ken Hollings

Sometimes something will be happening in pop culture and a movie will be right there, so you'll have this perception that maybe the movie got there first. But in reality, culture gets there first. — Ellen Page

My best audience and where I'm happiest is in the gay community. That's where I feel the most accepted. It's a community that appreciates pop culture like no other. For me, that's where I'm home and I always want to come home. — Katerina Graham

For me, Twitter works best as a way of taking pictures of being stuck in traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. If people really want to read really funny quips about life, parenting, and pop culture, then by all means read Michael Ian Black's tweets. — Michael Showalter

There's this way pop culture has been rammed down our throats that people think that if they were just in the right place at the right time, they'd be married to Heidi Klum. — Stephen Merchant

A lot of journalists like to suck up to celebrities, and then as soon as they're a safe distance away at their computers, they take shots. But that's the way society has become, especially in pop culture. — Scott Weiland

I've always thought that if comics are a part of pop culture [then] they should reflect pop culture, but a lot of the time comics, superhero comics especially, just feed on themselves. For me, comics should take from every bit of pop culture that they can; they've got the same DNA as music and film and TV and fashion and all of these things. — Kieron Gillen

I think 'Twilight' was such a phenomenon that it will be awhile before anything like that will happen again. Cause it really influenced pop culture, and the stars of it - well, the people who became stars out of it - their lives were completely changed. — Saoirse Ronan

People always say "pop culture." As if we have some high culture to distinguish it from. — Fran Lebowitz

According to pop culture, women are either searching for a man, with a man, or getting over one. — Jessica Valenti

If pop music reflects the culture, this will surely go down as the era in which people rose up and realized it was fun to dance at parties. — Dana Gould

Since we launched the original 'Pop Idol' in England, I've remained close with Simon Fuller. Working as executive producer on 'American idol' for its first seven years not only was an inspirational journey into the heart of American pop culture, it opened my eyes to the untapped potential of the incredibly dynamic young people in this world. — Nigel Lythgoe

In the future, women will have breasts all over. In the future, it will be a relief to find a place without culture. In the future, plates of food will have names and titles. In the future, we will all drive standing up. In the future, love will be taught on television and by listening to pop songs. — David Byrne

There is no comparing the brutality and cynicism of today's pop culture with that of forty years ago: from High Noon to Robocop is a long descent. — Charles Krauthammer

It is possible to be a fan of reality TV, talent shows and bubblegum pop and still have a brain. You will also see that a great many people know perfectly well how silly and camp and trivial their fandom is. They do not check in their minds when they enter a fan site. Judgement is not necessarily fled to brutish beasts, and men have not quite lost their reason. Which is all a way of questioning whether pop-culture hero worship is really so psychically damaging, so erosive of cognitive faculties, so corrupting of the soul of mankind as we are so often told. — Stephen Fry

After college I got a job and started working. This new career had absolutely nothing to do with my degree. — Jason Najum

I think rap music is the sole reason for a lot of black acceptance in pop culture; because the music is very popular, it gets our image out in other ways than in movies. — Ice Cube

The power of pop culture stories should not be underestimated, and there is an enormous potential for inspirational stories that can have a positive, transformative effect on our lives. — Anita Sarkeesian

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change. — John Podhoretz

Mathematical high culture collides with pop culture and all hell breaks loose! Harris takes us on a wild ride
never a dull moment! — Gregory Chaitin

I usually live in my own ignorant, pop-culture bubble, so I don't really know what people are doing. — Josh Thomas

The key to The Doors is the culture behind the myth. — Iggy Pop

We will never understand our world until we have come to terms with its future: it is the age in which we live. The Cold War depended upon internal division in order to maintain itself. Behind its various feints, games and strategies lay a perception of behavior as a form of enforced conformity. People would only do what they were prompted to do. This was the thinking that held the lonely crowd together, briefly connecting the forward thrust of material progress with the broader evolutionary curve. — Ken Hollings

I still have every record company sending every new, hot track to me, to do music videos, so I'm chained by the foot to pop culture. I still know what kids dress like and speak like, and I still hang out with them. It's just the nature of my day job. I am a freak of nature that has to understand them. — Joseph M. Kahn

I just see in pop culture, music, visual art, books, etc., a real hunger for the new and different, and I think that's amazing. Satisfying this hunger is part of the responsibility of a creative person. — Porochista Khakpour

Apparently our portmanteau is trending on Twitter." He let out a self-deprecating laugh. "I didn't even know what a portmanteau was before Jukebox Hero. It's a mashup of our names, like Brangelina or Robsten. No idea what ours is
what do our names make?" He considered this a for a moment before shaking his head.
"It's probably awful," he decided. "Could be worse, though; I hear the portmanteau for the main characters in The Hunger Games is ... well, their names are Peeta and Katniss. I'll let you guys figure that one out on your own. — Andrea D. Smith

Hendrix is one of the most revolutionary figures in today's pop culture, musically and sociologically. — Frank Zappa

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

I grew up in this little farm town, and I've always dreamt of Hollywood and pop culture, and then I suddenly found myself plopped in the middle of it. — Ross Mathews

There are a lot of reasons to be hated in pop culture, and being a straight white male is one of them. In fact, I almost hate me — John Rzeznik

I write pop songs. But I think it is sprinkled with a lot of counter-culture references. It ranged from rap to hip hop to trip hop, house, drum and bass, and experimental and improv and jazz. — Nelly Furtado

Most of my ukulele heroes were traditional players from Hawaii, like Eddie Kamae and Ohta-san. There may not be uke stars in popular culture, but there are certainly pop stars that play uke - George Harrison, Eddie Vedder, Taylor Swift, Train, and Paul McCartney. — Jake Shimabukuro

I can answer anything about any American pop culture song ever. — Mark McGrath

Pop culture is great, but it can be bad, at times. — Aisha Tyler

It's funny how film is the slowest art form to adapt to freedom. It's had freedom all along. It could've done whatever it wanted to. You know the same freedom that do-it-yourself punk and post-punk musicians had in the late 70s and ever since. That's about the time I started getting interested in film, and I assumed that film would be moving along with the other pop culture forms. Its finally done it but it's taken decades for it to catch up just to basement band level. — Guy Maddin

My mom was a big Elvis fan and a general pop culture buff, and so I grew up in a house filled with what were then called "movie magazines,"Before Elvis when Rhona Barrett wrote her column about the stars. And so it seeped in. — Laurie Foos

A nation lives by its myths and heroes. Many societies have survived defeat and invasion, even political and economic collapse. None has survived the corruption of its picture of itself. High and popular art are not in competition here. Both may help citizens decide what they are and what they admire. In our age, however, high art has given up speaking to the body of its fellow citizens. It devotes itself to technical displays that can appeal only to other technicians. — E. Christian Kopff

There are no pimps, no whores, no transvestites - gone. Now that's more the culture I'm comfortable in ... I don't like it in the house, you know what I mean, but I like it somewhere around. — Iggy Pop

Like 'Twin Peaks,' '24,' 'Mad Men,' and 'The Sopranos' before it, 'Downton Abbey' enriches the iconography and collective lore of pop culture. It replenishes the stream. — James Wolcott

I'M FRUSTRATED, because pop culture, music and movies glorify these types of police citizen altercations and promote an invincible attitude that continues to get young men killed in real life, away from safety movie sets and music studios. — Benjamin Watson

My wife is very interested in fashion. I am absolutely not. I couldn't give a toss. Fashion is a perfectly valid thing to be interested in. I'm just not particularly interested in pop culture. I think I am more interested in things that have a settled permanence about them. — Simon Winchester

Even though some individual scholars try to tell us there is no direct connection between images of violence and the violence confronting us in our lives, the commonsense truth remains- we are affected by the images we consume and by the states of mind we are in when watching them. If consumers want to be entertained, and the images shown us as entertaining are images of violent dehumanization, it makes sense that these acts become more acceptable in our daily lives and that we become less likely to respond to them with moral outrage or concern. Were we all seeing more images of loving human interaction, it would undoubtedly have a positive impact on our lives. — Bell Hooks

But when you're a teenage boy, you can be narrow-minded about things that are girlie, things that are frivolous, things that are pop. Boys always want to be taken seriously, and they always want to transcend the tawdry emotion of the pop singer
it's a fairly standard response to the rigors of young manhood ... This isn't so different from how people talk about culture now. Rock epics are for boys; pop hits are for girls. When you're a boy, pop is scary because it's a maneater. You sing along with a pop song, you turn into a girl. That takes some degree of emotional risk. — Rob Sheffield

The perils of credit and debt, especially perilous in the computer age, have long been acknowledged in pop culture, but very infrequently by TV. — Tom Shales

I t was a well-known fact among Christian homeschoolers that public
schools were bastions of gangs, drugs, teen pregnancy, rap music, pop culture, secular humanism, witchcraft, and body piercings. — Josh Sundquist

The manager turned up his palms. "I don't have those answers, Samirah, but Huginn and Muninn will brief you privately. Go with them to the high places of Valhalla. Let them show you thoughts and memories."
To me, that sounded like some trippy vision quest with Darth Vader appearing in a foggy cave. — Rick Riordan

Besides, it doesn't make any sense to have these characters living in the year 3000 when all their points of reference are from the pop culture of the 80's and the 90's. — Joel Hodgson

I wanted to tell a dream-come-true story about going from a closeted gay kid who loved pop culture to an out adult man making pop culture. I went from being told when I was 21 that I should never go on TV because of my crossed eyes to winding up being a 'Housewives' whisperer and talk-show host. — Andy Cohen

I do not think that a museum needs to engage with pop culture in order to make itself interesting to museumgoers. Museums are already interesting and engaging with pop culture for its own sake is just a quick way to seem and become dated. — John Hodgman

Pop culture hales you and wants you to fail. — Aisha Tyler

Pop culture has entered into a nostalgic malaise. Online culture is dominated by trivial mashups of the culture that existed before the onset of mashups, and by fandom responding to the dwindling outposts of centralized mass media. It is a culture of reaction without action. — Jaron Lanier

They should."
"Should be like a wood bee," she said.
It was a private joke, a mocking appreciation of the slipperiness of even the simplest hope, a nonce catchphrase like so many others lifted from favorite movies or TV shows that served as a rote substitute for conversation and bound them like shut-in twins, each other's best and, most often, only audience. — Stewart O'Nan

Human Millipede 6 was the highest-grossing movie of the summer and returned Nicholas Cage to Oscar-winning status. — C.Z. Hazard

It is time that we allow the Word of God, not the glamorized lies of Hollywood to become the cornerstone of our convictions, thoughts, and attitude. It is time we trade the emptiness of pop culture entertainment for the real-life adventure of a Christ-built existence. Only then will truth reign and rule in our lives. Only then will our lives make an eternal impact for His glory. — Leslie Ludy

In the sixties, the recycling of pop culture turning it into Pop art and camp had its own satirical zest. Now we're into a different kind of recycling. Moviemakers give movies of the past an authority that those movies didn't have; they inflate images that may never have compelled belief, images that were no more than shorthand gestures and they use them not as larger-than-life jokes but as altars. — Pauline Kael

So much of our cultural representation of what an investigative journalist looks like, in movies and pop culture, is about this really testosterone-filled dude screaming, "Give me what you got!" I didn't see myself as someone who would be good at or comfortable with that. — Sarah Stillman

To see how YouTube has become part of pop culture, it's been just amazing. — Chad Hurley

She has enough black eyeliner on to outline a corpse, and her skin's so pale she looks like she's just broken dawn. — John Green

Pop culture shapes our ideas of what is normal and what our dreams can be and what our roles are. Politics, of course, decides how the power and the money in the country is distributed. Both are equally important, and each affects the other. — Gloria Steinem

Yeah, I don't deal with current events or pop culture, and I avoid politics like the plague. — Max Cannon

Sejal had not thought of her home, or of India as a whole, as cool. She was dimly aware, however, of a white Westerner habit of wearing other cultures like T-shirts - the sticker bindis on club kids, sindoor in the hair of an unmarried pop star, Hindi characters inked carelessly on tight tank tops and pale flesh. She knew Americans liked to flash a little Indian or Japanese or African. They were always looking for a little pepper to put in their dish. — Adam Rex

The animated bug has bitten pop culture. It makes me feel happy and free. When you don't act seriously, you can make up your own rules. — Nicki Minaj

Beware young brides: The cruelest behaviors on earth are done in the name of, what some call, 'love.' Therefore, the Shulamite does a much better job at defining love than pop-culture.
pg 4 — Michael Ben Zehabe

Today as never before in their history, Americans are enthralled with military power. The global military supremacy that the United States presently enjoys - and is bent on perpetuating - has become central to our national identity. More than America's matchless material abundance or even the effusions of its pop culture, the nation's arsenal of high tech weaponry and the soldiers who employ that arsenal have come to signify who we are and what we stand for. — James McCartney

A lifelong movie I already knew the ending to — Jason Najum

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. Host

Okay, the question is, 'What enormously popular novel by William Peter Blatty, set in the posh Washington D.C. suburb of Georgetown, concerned the demonic possesion of a young girl?' '
'Johnny Cash', Henry replied.
'Jesus Christ!' Tricks Postino yelled. 'That's what you say to everythin! Johnny Cash, that's what you say to fuckin everythin!'
'Johnny Cash is everything,' Heny replied gravely... — Stephen King

It's a matter of resisting what something made you feel before. And resisting that as a consumer is not easy. I know it isn't for me, and not just when I consume pop culture. When I go into a book and it feels too familiar, I don't have the energy to do it. My whole reason for reading it is to be in a fictive space that is unfamiliar to me. — Lucy Corin

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

The last decade has seen a powerful counterassault on women's rights, a backlash, an attempt to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women. This counterassault is largely insidious: in a kind of pop-culture version of the Big Lie, it stands the truth boldly on its head and proclaims that the very steps that have elevated women's position have actually led to their downfall. — Susan Faludi

American people, what about the American people? I think the president delights in the fact that they have been roofied by technology and pop culture. They're not conscious to any expansion of power, which is why they're happy to exist in this dependant decline. — Greg Gutfeld

All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself.
This is why our educated teleholic friends' use of weary cynicism to try to seem superior to TV is so pathetic. — David Foster Wallace

There must be a rule of thumb in pop-culture archaeology that states that the allure of any topic is inversely related to its assigned importance in the affairs of humanity. The more trivial the subject, the dearer it is to most of its partisans and the more worthy of scholarship. The smallest things in life often mean the most to people. — Paul Di Filippo

One thing I found very interesting about comedians around the world was their knowledge of stuff outside of their own culture and comfort zone. That's not very common in the States. We produce our own soft power, which is pop culture, but we rarely try to absorb and learn information from other cultures and countries. — Hasan Minhaj

Robots are interesting because they exist as a real technology that you can really study - you can get a degree in robotics - and they also have all this pop-culture real estate that they take up in people's minds. — Daniel H. Wilson

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

The down side of Americans being obsessed with pop culture is that they kind of like it light. — Bill Griffith

I always thought that television was the way to go in my goal to invade pop culture because it got to towns in which there were no bookstores. That's how I used to think of it: How do I reach kids who not only don't read but probably have no access to much in the way of books? — Matt Groening

(Brin) 'How good is your lawyer, on a scale of Atticus Finch to Franklin and Bash? — Lisa Henry

Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?"
"I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?"
The doctor stared at him.
"I'm never going to find out what the hell was going on with Lost. I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people? — Peter Clines

If you keep up with pop culture, everybody knows the joke. — Shawn Wayans

I think all these pop cultural media often reflect conversations we're having in the real world at that moment in time. I think one of the big conversations we're having as a culture is we thought we'd solved sexism and racism, and we're realizing more and more that we haven't. — G. Willow Wilson

There was a time when I kept track of it all; when my mind worked like a giant lint brush being swept over the fuzzy surface of popular culture. But these days, pop culture seems to have gotten fuzzier and fuzzier; notoriety comes and goes in the snap of a finger. — Susan Orlean

That was something that I learned from Alan Ball from "Six Feet Under." He didn't really like to have too many pop culture references because they don't really hold up after a few years. — Jill Soloway

The existence of flying saucers is unlikely to be verified by an accumulation of facts and figures, dates and times, which, if anything, tend to dull and distract the creative intelligence, obscuring more than they reveal. — Ken Hollings

Twentieth-century culture's disease is the inability to feel their reality. People cluster to TV, soap operas, movies, theater, pop idols and they have wild emotion over symbols. But in the reality of their own lives, they're emotionally dead. — Jim Morrison

I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock. — Terry Teachout

If our cultural lives are sick, it is likely to be an impediment to our spiritual lives. Much popular culture promotes a spirit of restlessness. That is likely to be an obstacle to prayer, to concerned reflection, and to attentiveness to the needs of others. Popular culture also has an extremely limited range of sensibilities. I have never heard a work of popular music that has the depth of poignancy of the opening bars of Brahms's 'German Requiem,' for example, with its text, 'Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted.' I learn something about mourning when I hear Brahms; I know of no similar lessons in popular music. — Kenneth A. Myers

There is something magical to me about literature and fiction and I think it can do things not only that pop culture cannot do but that are urgent now: one is that by creating a character in a work of fiction you can allow a reader to leap over the wall of self and to allow him to imagine himself not only somewhere else but someone else in a way that television and movies, in a way that no other form can do. I think people are essentially lonely and alone and frightened of being alone. — David Foster Wallace

In the sense that Watchmen references movies, comic books, pop culture in general. It knows it's a movie. I really do like movies that ride that fine line, the razor's edge between parody and supporting the fake movie part of the movie. — Zack Snyder