Quotes & Sayings About Subculture

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture. — Michael Lewis

Assertions that the modern homosexual and modern gay subculture are significantly different from the past are based primarily upon ignorance of that past. — Rictor Norton

No, I'm not a comic book guy. I'm pretty fascinated with the subculture though and I do think that the world of comic books is such a natural transition into film. — Donal Logue

I think one of the bigger lessons the Internet has taught us is that 'niche' or 'subculture' are a lot bigger than anyone ever thought. — Warren Ellis

I think there are rock stars within every subgenre, and for people who are obsessed with musical theater Sutton Foster and Audra MacDonald are like Beyonce to them. I'm sure the a cappella world has their own version of that, and that exists in every geeky subculture. — Anna Kendrick

The practice of S/M is the creation of pleasure ... And that's why S/M is really a subculture. It's a process of invention. S/M isthe use of a strategic relationship as a source of pleasure. — Michel Foucault

Artists are creating their own genre sound, and other artists are building upon that sound and already creating a huge subculture created around one particular sound created by one artist. So, with all that happening, the genres are going to break down, and there's going to be a multitude of sound coming out. — Steve Aoki

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture. — Jonathan Lethem

Learning to communicate in and with a culture of science is a much broader undertaking than mastering a body of discrete conceptual or procedural knowledge. One observer, for example, describes the process of science education as one in which learners must engage in "border crossings" from their own everyday world culture into the subculture of science.1 The subculture of science is in part distinct from other cultural activities and in part a reflection of the cultural backgrounds of scientists themselves. — Heidi A. Schweingruber

When skateboarding and punk merged, it really became a large teen subculture. — Jeffrey Deitch

The worst thing you can do to a Juggalo is not know about their weird subculture. — Anders Holm

Generally speaking, by the time a subculture such as steampunk secures the attention of major media, resulting in extensive coverage of the craze, said phenomenon is already on the way out. — Paul Di Filippo

We have a thriving subculture of 'independent' American movies that makes an impact on America as a whole roughly equivalent to that of a the modern literary novel. These are the films sincere viewers marry, whereas, once upon a time, movies were a lifetime of one night stands. — Edward Jay Epstein

There's a lot about New York that is unique, and there's always a culture and a subculture going on everywhere. — Phil Ramone

As they seek authenticity, Emerging Evangelicals seek freedom - from loneliness, convention, unwanted authority, dominant paradigms, the prevailing social climate, and impersonal bureaucracies. Ironically, in this sense, their preferred narrative and their desired subjectivity are just as modern as what they seek to distance themselves from: the conservative Christian subculture, including its born-again narrative of awakening and transformation. — James S Bielo

I'm a pretty early adopter of social media. There's a whole subculture to it. I'm smart enough not to tweet things out of emotion. — Jon Favreau

I sort of do what I say and say what I do which I'm happy with because it makes my life real easy. When I was younger, people would say that I was inspired by David Lynch, so I went and watched his stuff and I was surprised. I thought it was smart, with what I was trying to do lyrically. So I started watching some of his stuff. I've never seen his movies in [their] entirety, I'm more interested in him as a person and how he came to be successful taking an alternative route, sort of a subculture icon. — Lana Del Rey

We've lost the real Jesus - or at least exchanged him for a newer, safer, sanitized, ineffectual one. We've created a Christian subculture that comes with its own set of customs, rules, rituals, paradigms, and products that are nowhere near the rugged, revolutionary faith of biblical Christianity. In our subculture Jesus would have never been crucified - he's too nice. — Jefferson Bethke

Internet porn makes everything more reasonable
once you've realized there is a massive subculture of upwardly mobile people who think it's erotic to see an Asian woman giving a hand job to a javelina, nothing else in the world seems crazy. — Chuck Klosterman

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again. — Philip Yancey

Gay is a subculture, a slur, a set of gestures, a slang, a look, a posture, a parade, a rainbow flag, a film genre, a taste in music, a hairstyle, a marketing demographic, a bumper sticker, a political agenda and philosophical viewpoint. Gay is a pre-packaged, superficial persona-a lifestyle. It's a sexual identity that has almost nothing to do with sexuality. — Jack Donovan

I am not saying that you have to be a jazz fan to be a Mod. The Mod scene incorporates a wide variety of music genres, and you don't have to like all of them to be a Mod. Considering that, you may not have to like every genre generally accepted in the Mod scene, but a basic respect for the genres that helped lay the foundation for the scene (Jazz, Soul, British Rhythm and Blues), especially their place in the scene, is something I feel should be expected of anybody in the Mod scene who wants their opinion taken seriously. That said, let's be realistic: You may not have to like any one or two or ten specific genres of Mod music, but if you don't like any of them, yet still fancy yourself to be a "Mod", don't be surprised when people in the scene don't take you seriously at all. — Ruadhan J. McElroy

In order to describe a particular subculture, you might want to portray people who are typical or representative of that subculture; but to dramatize it, to make it an interesting setting for a story, you want to bring someone anomalous into that setting, to see how she conforms to it, and it to her. — Jonathan Dee

Lo, each subculture has its own language, and verily I am not a parody. You don't believe me? Get with the program, crackpot! — Barry Webster

Unix is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture. It is our Gilgamesh epic: a living body of narrative that many people know by heart, and tell over and over again - making their own personal embellishments whenever it strikes their fancy. The bad embellishments are shouted down, the good ones picked up by others, polished, improved, and, over time, incorporated into the story. [ ... ] Thus Unix has slowly accreted around a simple kernel and acquired a kind of complexity and asymmetry about it that is organic, like the roots of a tree, or the branchings of a coronary artery. Understanding it is more like anatomy than physics. — Neal Stephenson

There is still a very strong subculture of people who want to do great things on an instrument, and who are stimulated by hearing people who can. That's reassuring. But it's gonna take a person - and I don't know who this is - to come along and reinvent the guitar as a virtuosic instrument in a completely different realm than any of us have done, or anybody else in the past. That's the clincher. Maybe that will happen and maybe it won't ... — Steve Vai

The Mafia's involvement with gay bars is ironic on so many levels. Macho guys ruled gangland but supported a subculture for nelly queens. Most mobsters were evil sociopaths motivated only by financial self-interest but nevertheless were doing a good thing in providing social spaces for the gay community. The mob was on the wrong side of the liquor laws by serving gay folk but on the right side of the 14th Amendment in arguing for equal protection. The Mafia exploited an oppressed community but advanced the gay cause. — Phillip Crawford Jr.

We need to be very careful to go to the pages of the Scripture to learn about God's will and the leading of the Spirit, and not simply to listen to the popular teachings of the Christian subculture in which we live. — R.C. Sproul

The time for invisible boundaries that guard the 'purity' of gaming as a niche subculture is over. The violent macho power fantasy will no longer define what gaming is all about. — Anita Sarkeesian

It's so hard being goth. You have to have a bad time everywhere. — Clint Catalyst

The rise of the Net and the Web represents a victory for the counterculture and the subculture. The next generation, raised on the Net as their primary medium, won't even know what consensus reality is. — R.U. Sirius

She didn't know that my heart was a sandstorm waiting to open her skin in a desert of cuts. She didn't know the animal that waited in my stomach, silently shredding the walls. For her, my heart wore small white shoes and carried a purse, went to bed early. I wanted to shoot myself into her arms so she understood the need to crash cars with me, to tear up pavement because we were beautiful. — Michelle Tea

The reformation of the church must occur so that there is a reformation of our subculture, and then our subculture will affect the larger polis. Expecting our faith to affect the larger polis when it has not yet changed the average shelf at the local Christian book store is expecting something that is not going to happen. With the weird exception of baseball, where the ball is handled entirely by the defense, you can't score points until you have the ball. And reformers will not have the ball until they have a culture. — Douglas Wilson

As I've said before, "the Mod generation", contrary to popular belief, was not born in even 1958, but in the 1920s after a steady gestation from about 1917 or so. Now, Mod certainly came of age, fully sure of itself by 1958, completely misunderstood by 1963, and in a perpetual cycle of reinvention and rediscovery of itself by 1967 and 1975, respectively, but it was born in the 1920s, and I will maintain this. I don't care who disagrees with me, and there are dozens of reasons that I do so - from the Art Deco aesthetic, to flapper fashions (complete with bobbed hair), to androgyny and subtle effeminacy, to jazz. — Ruadhan J. McElroy

Even personal tastes are learned, in the matrix of a culture or a subculture in which we grow up, by very much the same kind of process by which we learn our common values. Purely personal tastes, indeed, can only survive in a culture which tolerates them, that is, which has a common value that private tastes of certain kinds should be allowed. — Kenneth E. Boulding

If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin - the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile - which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren't dead already. The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings. — Johann Hari

Most people recognize me from The Shawshank Redemption, but there is this subculture of people who have collected all 13 episodes of Greg The Bunny. And I'm still close to a number of the creative people, Dan Milano particularly, who created Warren The Ape and Greg The Bunny and all of those characters. — Bob Gunton

There's a thing in the U.K., particularly in London, where it's kind of the idea of subculture and counterculture and the outside and the idea that it's great to be a freak, and the freak always wins. So I think English girls are a lot less scared of being the freak or looking like an idiot. — Edie Campbell

I got a little bit of a sense for the subculture, which is the equivalent of any subculture, really. The stakes are high, even if you live in a small town. It's like the annual bass fishing contests, or whatever it is. The stakes are always absurdly high, and this is no different. The competition at this butter carving things, from what I understand, is not that far off from what we're depicting in the movie. — Ty Burrell

I'm asked a lot what the best thing about cooking for a living is. And it's this: to be a part of a subculture. To be part of a historical continuum, a secret society with its own language and customs. To enjoy the instant gratification of making something good with one's hands
using all one's senses. It can be, at times, the purest and most unselfish way of giving pleasure (thought oral sex has to be a close second). — Anthony Bourdain

Fabulous. If you possess it, you don't need to ask what it is. When you attempt to delineate it, you move away from it. Fabulous is one of those words that provide a measure of the degree to which a person or event manifests a particular oppressed subculture's most distinctive, invigorating features. What are the salient features of fabulousness? Irony. Tragic History. Defiance. Gender-fuck. Glitter. Drama. It is not butch. It is not hot. The cathexis surrounding fabulousness is not necessarily erotic. The fabulous is not delineated by age or beauty. It is raw materials reworked into illusion. To be truly fabulous, one must completely triumph over tragedy, age, and physical insufficiencies. The fabulous is the rapturous embrace of difference, the discovering of self not in that which has rejected you but in that which makes you unlike, the dislike, the other. — Tony Kushner

For me, therapy is partly translation therapy, the talking cure a second-language cure. My going to a shrink is, among other things, a rite of initiation: initiation into the language of the subculture within which I happen to live, into a way of explaining myself to myself. But gradually, it becomes a project of translating backward.
The way to jump over my Great Divine is to crawl backward over it in English. It's only when I retell my whole story, back to the beginning, and from the beginning onward, in one language, that I can reconcile the voices within me with each other; it is only then that the person who judges the voices and tells the stories begins to emerge. — Eva Hoffman

I would dream. I focused all my attention on going to America. The subculture, James Dean, the rock n' roll, the beat writers. — David Bowie

Quin stopped halfway across the room, his head cocked to the side. He stared at Mattheus like an explorer who couldn't figure out if he'd discovered a fascinating new subculture or a bunch of locals playing What Can We Get the Foreigner (sic) Eat? — Amy Fecteau

Ideas about a person's place in society, his role, lifestyle, and ego qualities will lose their hold as the cohesive forces in society disintegrate. Subculture values will proliferate to such a bewildering extent that a whole new class of professionals will arise to control them. Such a Transmutation Technology will deal in fashions, in ways of being. Lifestyle consultants will become the new priests of our civilizations. They will be the new magicians. — Peter J. Carroll

Look, there's no denying that comics have moved dramatically into the mainstream in North American culture in the last 10 years, and for someone like me who's always tried to make a living at it, it's been great, I'm very grateful for it. But at the same time, it's not a subculture-y thing anymore; it's something that's in the New York Times and the New Yorker. — Adrian Tomine

'TableTop' is packed with gaming celebrities and independent game creators. This is a huge subculture that really doesn't have a vehicle to rally around or educate people with. — Felicia Day

A segregated spiritual subculture does women no good, even if it does have adorable butterflies in the logo. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

When I was growing up, hip-hop music existed as American thing. If you listened to it you were listening to an American subculture, whereas now you're just listening to pop music that everyone shares. I think that's big. — Jonas Carpignano

Though knowledge itself increasingly ignores boundaries between fields, professors are apt to organize their pedagogy around the methods and history of their academic subculture rather than some coherent topic in the world. — Steven Pinker

The No. 1 quote critics give me is, 'Thom, your work is irrelevant.' Now, that's a fascinating, fascinating comment. Yes, irrelevant to the little subculture, this microculture, of modern art. But here's the point: My art is relevant because it's relevant to 10 million people. That makes me the most relevant artist in this culture. — Thomas Kinkade

I think people do sci-fi a huge disservice by lumping it as some sort of bizarre subculture genre when I think everybody's lives are impacted by sci-fi at some point. — Mark Sheppard

Joining a sub-culture, any sub-culture, for whatever reason, is as I see it never a legitimate self-expression. It is always a result of sheep mentality; a wish to belong somewhere. — Varg Vikernes

Hipsters seek refuge in church, Our Lady of Perpetual Subculture. There is some discussion as to whether or not they are still cool but then they are calmed by the obscure location and the arrival of their kind. Keep the address to yourself, let the rabble fund it themselves. Wow, this crappy performance art is really making me feel no so terrible about my various emotional issues. — Colson Whitehead

A room full of fags gives me the horrors. They jerk around like puppets on invisible strings, galvanized into hideous activity that is the negation of everything living and spontaneous. The live human being has moved out of these bodies long ago. But something moved in when the original tenant moved out. — William S. Burroughs

I like pot, I enjoy pot, I like to smoke it. But, the one thing I don't like about pot is the subculture it's spawned. I think it's embarrassing and really juvenile and uncreative — David Cross

A Hit Of This,' Mr. President? The Huffington Post President Barack Obama had an up-close encounter with Denver's marijuana subculture during a stop in the city on Tuesday night. — Anonymous

No science of any kind can be divorced from ethical considerations ... Science is a human learning process which arises in certain subcultures in human society and not in others, and a subculture as we seen is a group of people defined by acceptance of certain common values, that is, an ethic which permits extensive communication between them. — Kenneth E. Boulding

I feel that Christian music is a subculture directed towards the Christians. It's not really being exposed to non-Christians and it's not really created for non-Christians, so non-Christians almost never hear any of this music. — Larry Norman

It has taken me years to distill the Gospel out of the subculture in which I first encountered it. Sadly, many of my friends gave up on the effort, never getting to Jesus because the pettiness of the church blocked the way. — Philip Yancey

The existence of homosexuality, not as a circumstantial matter of passing sexual whim, but as a shared condition and identity, raises the intriguing possibility of homosexual culture, or at least of a minority subculture with sexual identity as its base. At the very least, by sympathetic identification with cultural texts which appeared to be affirmative, homosexual people saw a way to shore up their self-respect in the face of constant moral attack, and they found materials with which to justify themselves not only to each other but also to those who found their very existence, let alone their behaviour, unjustifiable. — Gregory Woods

The good thing, really, is that electronic music started as a fringe subculture, and now it's the biggest youth culture in the world. People pretty much everywhere go crazy for electronic music. — Paul Van Dyk

In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions. — Nathaniel Branden

There is a growing subculture of barefoot runners, people who got rid of their shoes. And what they have found uniformly is you get rid of the shoes, you get rid of the stress, you get rid of the injuries and the ailments. — Christopher McDougall

Sportswriters are a rude and brainless subculture of fascist drunks, a gang of vicious monkeys jerking off in a zoo cage ... more disgusting by nature than maggots oozing out the carcass of a dead animal. — Hunter S. Thompson

The subculture of felons is in great vogue among adolescents. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, and so forth allow us Republicans to say to America's young people, 'We be thugs.' The GOP may capture the youth vote at last. — P. J. O'Rourke

Statistically speaking, the Cheerful Early Riser is rejected more completely than a member of any other subculture, save those with boot odor. — Ellen Goodman

While the concepts of vigneron and terroir exist elsewhere in France, no community of vignerons takes all of this more seriously than the subculture, or perhaps, superculture of Burgundian vignerons. These philosopher-farmer-shamans strive to bottle the divine as the divine deserves, convinced that the blood of Christ flows from these veins of the earth. Terroir and vigneron, in Burgundy, are terms of a religion, and of all the sacraments and rituals Burgundian vignerons hold dear, none is more sacred than the marrying of a vine to earth. — Maximillian Potter

I like movies that are specific. Movies that home in on a very specific subculture, a specific discipline, a specific world. — Damien Chazelle

To struggle" was the verb most commonly associated with homosexuality within the ex-gay subculture. To accept the gay label was to associate with a lifestyle God didn't ordain and couldn't bless, yet to adopt the label straight seemed pretentious and disingenuous. We felt that the word struggle communicated the truth of it all. I was, and we were, struggling between two worlds. Trying not to be gay was one big excruciating struggle, because it is impossible. Trying to be straight is equally impossible. Such attempts are pretty much always motivated by shame and fear, unfortunately sending too many gay Christians into dangerous and secretive lives that most openly gay people would never lead. — Leslie Chambers

It's true, though, others won't understand me. I know that. I'm still an alien in the American Christian subculture.
Each evening I retreat from it, and I go straight to the Gospels.
It's not out of duty that I read about Jesus; it's a respite. — Brant Hansen

I remember going into galleries and seeing this thing called conceptual art, and I understand people's marginalization from what the art subculture is because if you haven't crashed the codes, and if you don't know what it is, you feel it's a conspiracy against your unintelligence. You feel it's fraud. — Barbara Kruger

Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values. — Kenneth E. Boulding

Sex and magic are intertwined experiences - sex is one kind of magic (and can be made more magical without being concerned with sex-magic at any point), and magic can be, while erotic and arousing, not necessarily sexual in the way that is often understood. There is a commonly-held belief that those who practice sex-magic are indulging themselves in wild orgiastic rites at every opportunity. This is rarely the case. After all, if you need to go through lots of occult rigmarole just to get laid, then you're a bit sad, aren't you? Then again, the occult subculture is full of SAD people, desperate to finally get laid and attempting to turn to sex-magic as a last resort. — Phil Hine

The word of God is definitely above culture, in terms of what or who should have authority in our lives. However, we must remember that we are within culture, and our calling in Christ is to play our part in the redemption and transformation of individuals and cultures. I believe the recent history of the religious subculture teaches all too clearly that unless we are moving forward in seeking the genuine transformation of culture, then we are standing still and it is transforming us. — Steve Scott

To acquire the full consciousness of self is to know oneself so different from others that no longer feels allied with men except by purely animal contacts: nevertheless, among souls of this degree, there is an ideal fraternity based on differences,
while society fraternity is based on resemblances.
The full consciousness of self can be called originality of soul, -and all this is said only to point out the group of rare beings to which Andre Gide belongs.
The misfortune of these beings, when they express themselves, is that they do it with such odd gestures that men fear to approach them; their life of social contacts must often revolve in the brief circle of ideal fraternities; or, when the mob consents to admit such souls, it is as curiosities or museum objects. Their glory is, finally, to be loved from afar & almost understood, as parchments are seen & read above sealed cases. — Remy De Gourmont

Punk is no longer a subculture or a counterculture in any way. It's totally just a small reflecting mirror for the same things that go on in larger culture. — Geoff Rickly

It doesn't take long to figure out that in the Christian subculture, the biggest criticism to throw at someone is to question their integrity as a believer. — Jennifer Knapp

Like many middle-class Americans, especially those who are white and male, I
was raised in a subculture that insisted I could do anything I wanted to do, be
anything I wanted to be, if I were willing to make the effort. The message was
that both the universe and I were without limits, given enough energy and
commitment on my part. God made things that way, and all I had to do was to
get with the program. My troubles began, of course, when I started to slam
into my limitations, especially in the form of failure. — Parker J. Palmer

The importance of Liking Yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era
but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything. — Hunter S. Thompson