Michael Medved Quotes

I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

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.

I'm making sure to cover all the bases. Like, I've always wanted a leather jacket like Michael Jackson's in "Thriller" since I was a kid. I'm trying to incorporate a lot of elements of pop culture that I've always revered or was really into when I was young.

Asked to make a list of the men who have most dominated the thinking of the modern world, many educated people would name Freud, Einstein, Marx and Darwin. Of these four, only Darwin was not Jewish. In a world where Jews are only a tiny percentage of the population, what is the secret of the disproportionate importance the Jews have had in the history of Western culture?

I'm trying to get more into other things, where reality is nothing but each individual's way of thinking.

The reality is that fulfillment, success and all of these good things comes from trying to help those that we care about to achieve those things. How can I help somebody I care about find the job they love? How can I help somebody I care about find happiness in their work? And when we commit to service it actually biologically and anthropologically is more likely to lead to our own success and our own happiness.

I do less-fanciful reality. I celebrate the fat, the ugly, the women who can't get guys. I'm not trying to entertain you; I'm trying to make you passionate.

I think reality television, unless it's inspirational, which it very rarely is, I think it's embarrassing. It's embarrassing state of affairs that we're in.

I do like Canadian poetry. Christian Bök, Anne Carson, Carmine Starnino, and Don McKay are a few of the Canadian poets whose work has been important to me. But I'm not sure that I do see poetry as a world apart. Some of my metaphors are based in the fantastic, but I try to be true to life as I understand it. That understanding is affected by my Canadianness, my Americanness, my whiteness, my gender, my age, my education, my experience...everything about me affects my view of reality. But I try to wrestle against those partialities, not embrace them.

On reflection, some things do super well because they hit with the time. Some things do super well because they are able to activate a kind of echo chamber or bandwagon or cascade - they didn't particularly hit with the time. Some things are just too astonishingly good to not hit the top. Those three explanations, with respect to the Star Wars phenomenon, seem to me all to pass the plausibility test, and to explore them, with respect to Star Wars, I think casts light not just on the saga of our time, but also on everything about our culture.

Sacrifices have to be made if you want to make a dent in the world, and that's what I started out to do - to make a dent in pop culture.

I have always loved David Bowie. When he began to experiment with pop music in the 80's, I really thought there was a really fascinating reverence for it. A lot of people looked at pop music as just idiot music, or dance music, and with this he was giving it a lot of respect.

Reality television, anybody can be a star at any minute.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it. If you were going to give Rock 'n' Roll another name you might as well call it Chuck Berry. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - Rock and Roll or Christianity.

I think everybody in my generation, we wanted to be Elvis.

Fact is, the desperate desire to be cool has skewed our culture toward nihilism, carelessness, and ineptitude. It is now cool to be an idiot. A jackass. It's cool to be a failure, as long as your failure is the basis for a reality show.

We live in a media culture and whoever controls and influences and uses media the best has the power for change.

Names are not always what they seem.

I think, what I want to say is that yes, my ideas have travelled into popular culture they also emerged from popular culture in a way, or from the general public as you put it. But not as a program.

Adults are living increasingly as children: completely in their imaginations. Reading Harry Potter while every newspaper in the country goes out of business. They know so little that is real.

These problems are real, and you can't turn off real life. So I won't try. Instead, I'll give you a set of tools to help you deal with real life.

Trying to please everyone can be very hard, but, like Shrek or The Simpsons, Robin Hood manages to entertain adults and children at the same time, but in different ways.

Khadi service, village service and Harijan service are one in reality, though three in name.

I try to capture reality, nothing else.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of everyone of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.