Frank Deford Quotes

Fifty years ago, it was the dream of every bohemian artist to be seen getting out of a limousine wearing blue jeans and sneakers. Today, it's the dream of probably half the people in the country.

Statues of sports stars are all the rage - especially in baseball.

Hero worship has died with heroes, and if someone bows down today, it is to pick up something.

Sports figures are to the '70s what movie stars were to the '60s.

I married the first man I ever kissed. When I tell this to my children, they just about throw up.

Modesty used to be considered a natural female attribute. No more.

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.

Cultural standards evolve. The meaning of the public interest also, of course, evolves.

Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.

A weak, insecure nation needs sporting heroes, players larger than life on the cricketing field, who can transcend the limitations of their country and team.

The religious imagery and fairytales that formed our shared cultural references have been replaced by the cult of celebrity. Marilyn is the sex goddess, Camilla Parker Bowles is cast as the wicked witch, Che Guevara is the revolutionary. Celebrities have become visual shorthand for narratives that shape our lives.

Americans are changing right before our eyes. They are choosing different lifestyles, families, traditions and ways of living.

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

A lot of people... kind of make heroes that are separate from us, people who are, you know, like... John Wayne and Errol Flynn and, you know, Denzel Washington... people who are different, who are larger than life.

Classically posh girls like Victoria Hervey are now trying to be Hollywood girls. Hollywood girls are trying to be posh girls. Everything is all mixed up, turned on its head.

Architecture has paid high tribute to the leaders of mankind.

Note the startling regularity through history with which society martyrs the rebel in one generation and worships him in the next.

The America I love is slipping away.

I'm sure all the people who have been born 20 years ago don't know anything about me at all except 'LOVE', and that's a nasty word.

We're a nation of celebrity and hero worshipers, so much so that we make heroes out of those who aren't, such as John Wayne: a patriotic, red-blooded, two-fisted American who spent the Second World War in the trenches on the movie lots of Hollywood.

In the fun house of today's metastisizing sports-entertainment megaplex, when every day brings another story revealing how these 'heroes' we create are fashioned from base clay, a pause might be in order to reflect on athletes who actually embodied the qualities we think we admire in the too-easily deified.

I don't believe in the institution of marriage anymore. It's redundant; it's an outdated institution. It's like lanterns in a house, you don't use them anymore.

What we need to do is open our eyes, smell the coffee and just understand what the society has become. Today, I can discuss many things with my 15-year-old son which I could not talk about with my father.

I've been thinking a lot about how we worship celebrity and how we have Elvis and Marilyn Monroe and Jesus all on the same playing field.

America has no monuments to ideas; her monuments are erected to individuals.