I wasn't that familiar with silent films. I didn't know, for example, how hugely popular silent films were in the 1920s, how people would go to the movies several times a week.
At nineteen, it seems to me, one has a right to be arrogant; time has usually not begun its stealthy and rotten subtractions. It takes away your hair and your jump-shot, according to a popular country song, but in truth it takes away a lot more than that.
I think our culture right now is a culture that's trying to find itself. They're trying to figure out what is it? Is it social media followers? Is it trying to be popular? Is it money? Is it fame? Is it power? They're searching for identity and so many of us have been there, and we'll get back to that place of what is our identity? Who are we? More importantly, whose are we? For me, I find my identity in a relationship with Christ.
Popular Christianity has for its emblem a gibbet, for its chief sensation a sanginary execution after torture, for its central mystery is an insane vengeance bought off by a trumpery expiation. But there is a nobler and profounder Christianity which affirms the sacred mystery of equality and forbids the glaring futility and folly of vengeance.
I'd like to be remembered as a premier singer of songs, not just a popular act of a given period.
Whenever you take over something that is popular and has a fanatical following that loves it, you're never going to please everyone. The trick is to have enough wherewithal to follow through with what you want to do with it and give it time to evolve.
Boycotts tend to make the shunned more popular.
Law is only what is popular. Not what's right or wrong.
I was never allowed to read the popular American children's books of my day because, as my mother said, the children spoke bad English without the author's knowing it.
I was educated in a deeply kind of un-politically-correct way. I went to St. John's College which is this kind of Great Books school which is equally popular with hardcore conservatives who want their kids to read the Great White Men canon and sort of free-thinking liberals like my parents.
Religion is not a popular error; it is a great instinctive truth, sensed by the people, expressed by the people.
Anything that's popular is a rear-view image.
Until we believe that we are as bad as God says we are, we can never believe that He will do for us what He says He will do. Right here is where popular religion breaks down.
There is a popular heresy abroad today which states that if a little is good, more is better. Following this dictum creates a life which is never fulfilling. Even while you are engaged in one rich experience you are looking about for another. There is no contentment because future plans are always intruding on the present.
Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty; power is ever stealing from the many to the few. The manna of popular liberty must be gathered each day or it is rotten. The living sap of today outgrows the dead rind of yesterday. The hand entrusted with power becomes, either form human depravity or esprit de corps, the necessary enemy of the people. Only by continued oversight can the democrat in office be prevented from hardening into a despot; only by unintermitted agitation can a people be sufficiently awake to principle not to let liberty be smothered in material prosperity.
People don't like to vote against something that's so incredibly popular.
You can spend your life trying to be popular, and that's a tricky business. You can just try to be true to yourself.
If something is well-written, it has a chance to be good and if it's not well-written, it will not be good. It could even become popular, but it won't be good.
Control of thought is more important for governments that are free and popular than for despotic and military states. The logic is straightforward: a despotic state can control its domestic enemies by force, but as the state loses this weapon, other devices are required to prevent the ignorant masses from interfering with public affairs, which are none of their business… the public are to be observers, not participants, consumers of ideology as well as products.
I'm pretty much out of popular culture altogether.