Mass culture quotes:

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a steady diet of mass culture is a form of deprivation. -- Pauline Kael
In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished. -- Walker Percy
Television is completely another medium. For me, Lady Gaga and HBO are bringing us to mass culture. -- Marina Abramovic
If literature survives at all, it is as retreat for those who refuse to assimilate to American mass culture. -- Sven Birkerts
The bastard form of mass culture is humiliated repetition... always new books, new programs, new films, news items, but always the same meaning. -- Roland Barthes
Realize that the banality around us that passes as "hipness" or "mass culture" is as satisfying as "mass food"-only it comes in much more unappetizing portions. -- Perry Brass
Eight Hours For What We Will is a major contribution to modern American working-class history and to the history of a changing American popular and mass culture. -- Herbert Gutman
I want to tell beautiful stories. I know I want to tell stories that appeal to a large audience. I want to make movies that appeal to mass culture. -- Steve Antin
Nobody seriously questions the principle that it is the function of mass culture to maintain public morale, and certainly nobody in the mass audience objects to having his morale maintained. -- Robert Warshow
At times, the biggest challenge in embracing simplicity will be the vague feeling of isolation that comes with it, since private sacrifice doesn't garner much attention in the frenetic world of mass culture. -- Rolf Potts
Art has knowledge and skills, and to come to know them is to be implicitly against a culture that is against knowledge - today's mass culture, which aims to produce a lot of consuming morons. -- Matthew Collings
Modern mass culture, aimed at the 'consumer', the civilisation of prosthetics, is crippling people's souls, setting up barriers between man and the crucial questions of his existence, his consciousness of himself as a spiritual being. -- Andrei Tarkovsky
The mass culture of childhood right now is astonishingly technical. Little kids know their Unix path punctuation so they can get around the Web, and they know their HTML and stuff. It's pretty shocking to me. -- Jaron Lanier
The art world is now a slave of mass culture. We have a sound-bite culture and so we have sound-bite art. You look at it, you get it - it's as immediate and as superficial as that. -- Matthew Collings
Often, these downplay the power of cultural imperialism - in that sense, playing the game of US interests - by reassuring us that the global success of American mass culture is not as bad as all that. -- Fredric Jameson
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. -- Steven Johnson
The kind of people who can assemble huge crowds into one spot will be the major influences on mass culture in the next decade. The rock enthusiasts have created some of the most exciting theatrical events on the planet. -- Jim Morrison
Those who know New York City primarily through tourism or mass culture may think of us natives as possessing certain shared characteristics, not all of them flattering. But the true, volatile charisma of New York lies in how balkanised it is. -- Jonathan Dee
Reading is one of the true pleasures of life. In our age of mass culture, when so much that we encounter is abridged,adapted, adulterated, shredded, and boiled down, it is mind-easing and mind-inspiring to sit down privately with a congenial book... -- Thomas S. Monson
Detachment is the prerogative of an elite; and as the dandy is the nineteenth century's surrogate for the aristocrat in matters ofculture, so Camp is the modern dandyism. Camp is the answer to the problem: how to be a dandy in the age of mass culture. -- Susan Sontag
The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed. -- Susan Sontag
The more we retreat from the culture at large the more room we will have to carve out lives of meaning, the more we will be able to wall off the flood of illusions disseminated by mass culture and the more we will retain sanity in an insane world. -- Chris Hedges
A world of few choices, whether in jeans or mates, is a world in which individual differences become sources of alienation, unhappiness, even self-loathing. If no jeans fit, you'll feel uncomfortable or inferior. If no housing developments reflect your taste for unique architecture, you'll write screeds against philistine mass culture. -- Virginia Postrel
We have to change the culture of mass violence we have. -- Joe Manchin
American mass media culture, with its celebrities, shopping hysteria, sound bites, formulaic plots, received ideas, and nauseating repetitions, depresses me. -- Siri Hustvedt
When I go to Japan and do shows I play for 1,000 to 1,500 people. I like a lot about Japan. Their popular culture and mass commercialization appeals to me. -- Matthew Sweet
It seems there is no area in our culture that is not touched, changed, even swallowed by the Internet. It's both medium and message, mass and personal, social and solitary. -- John Battelle
A serious problem in America is the gap between academe and the mass media, which is our culture. Professors of humanities, with all their leftist fantasies, have little direct knowledge of American life and no impact whatever on public policy. -- Camille Paglia
I think there's a lot of anesthesia being - that's been pumped into American culture, the mass media television, various forms of entertainment, and the illusion of wealth that we now understand to be an illusion as well as the illusion that America is a world power. -- Parker Palmer
The really interesting moment will be when you have a critical mass of people engaging through the networks, more than through the press and TV. When that happens, the culture of politics has to change, moving away from controlled one-way messages towards a political culture that is more questioning. -- Geoff Mulgan
I know there are lots of positives in the evolution of technology, but I also think it will be responsible for the end of a unique character, of a specific kind of geographical culture. The world is getting so small, and mass production is getting so big. Everything is in danger of becoming the same. -- Laura Marling
We were a religious, practicing, Catholic family - Mass together on Sunday, Catholic schools, and parents who practiced everything they preached. A great gift was their total absence of any derogatory talk about people of any race or culture and we were on a street of many faiths, though no other races at that early time. -- Trina
The only way to make something cheaply today is to have it mass-produced. For example, you wear the same shoes as everyone else. If you had a fabber, you could custom-make shoes that perfectly fit your feet. Three-dimensional printing will help us move away from the mass consumption that is so deeply ingrained in our culture. -- Hod Lipson
Gardening is not trivial. If you believe that it is, closely examine why you feel that way. You may discover that this attitude has been forced upon you by mass media and the crass culture it creates and maintains. The fact is, gardening is just the opposite - it is, or should be, a central, basic expression of human life. -- Andrew Weil
Keeping the peace with the particular man in one's life becomes more essential than battling the mass male culture. -- Susan Faludi
We have to constantly critique imperialist white supremacist patriarchal culture because it is normalized by mass media and rendered unproblematic. -- bell hooks
Do we have free will, or do the mass media and our culture control us, our desires and actions, from the moment weâ??re born? -- Chuck Palahniuk
The premise upon which mass compulsion schooling is based is dead wrong. It tries to shoehorn every style, culture, and personality into one ugly boot that fits nobody. -- John Taylor Gatto
So science alone cannot solve this problem [mass extinction of humans]. It's something that we can only tackle by bringing science together with culture, economics, and even politics. -- Annalee Newitz

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