Michael Dirda Quotes

Like Christmas, Easter has lost much of its religious meaning in popular culture. Ask your average kid what the holiday is about and they will tell you all about the Easter Bunny, eggs hunts and baskets full of candy.

I think we've taken the meaning of Christmas out. People don't stop and think about Jesus or the birth of Jesus. When they think of Christmas, they think of Santa Claus and - for the children, and they think of giving gifts and out-giving the next person of spending their time looking for the right thing for somebody who has everything.

The trouble with us in America isn't that the poetry of life has turned to prose, but that it has turned to advertising copy.

History will see advertising as one of the real evil things of our time. It is stimulating people constantly to want things, want this, want that.

Once again, we come to the Holiday Season, a deeply religious time that each of us observes, in his own way, by going to the mall of his choice.

In the United States Christmas has become the rape of an idea.

Today, people are more into the glitz and the glamour of everything. We don't even read the inside of records anymore.

To perceive Christmas through its wrappings becomes more difficult with every year.

We're consumers. We are by-products of a lifestyle obsession. Murder, crime, poverty, these things don't concern me. What concerns me are celebrity magazines, television with 500 channels, some guy's name on my underwear. Rogaine, Viagra, Olestra...

Twenty-five years ago, Christmas was not the burden that it is now; there was less haggling and weighing, less quid pro quo, less fatigue of body, less weariness of soul; and, most of all, there was less loading up with trash.

I wish my daughter wasn't spending time thinking of Kim Kardashian or Rihanna.

When I was a little girl, if I didn't eat my soup, my mother would say, 'You have to think of all the Chinese children who have nothing to eat.' But now, for my children, Chinese people make everything, and for my grandchildren, they buy everything.

In the '80s, everything became too serious.

My dad's quite a conservative person, and he brought me up to be very questioning of the commercial world. He looked down on pop culture. I definitely got the impression that pop was evil and that Britney Spears was evil.

I'm tired of hearing about money, money, money, money, money. I just want to play the game, drink Pepsi, wear Reebok.

So after the Lewinsky scandal, everything changed, and we moved from using the Bible to address the moral issues of our time, which were social, to moral issues of our time that were very personal. I have continued that relationship up until the present.

People's interest in glamour and clothes and nylon stockings and all those things were, when I was a little boy, the sort of world that I listened to.

I found it interesting that as people become more technically oriented all over the world, at the same time people are becoming increasingly spiritual. The success of the Da Vinci code - even though it was a great yawn - also showed people's interest in religion.

We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures.

The trimmings of wealth are not as important to me and my generation as they were to my parents' generation.

The great question of our time is, 'Will we be motivated by materialistic philosophy or by spiritual power?'

And yet, in a culture like ours, which is given to material comforts, and addicted to forms of entertainment that offer immediate gratification, it is surprising that so much poetry is written.

The modern Little Red Riding Hood, reared on singing commercials, has no objection to being eaten by the wolf.

The masses in highly industrialized countries like England, the United States, or France are largely de-Christianized. Technology, and the way of life it produces, undermines Christianity far more effectively than do violent measures.

Halloween is woke, and there's nothing we can do about it.