Stanley Kubrick Quotes

I think there's something basically wrong with the general public that they do need their icons.

We live in a celebrity-obsessed society.

We obsess about celebrities. We create them, build myths around them, and then hunt them and destroy them. I don't know where it's taking us or what it means, but I know we do it. I have seen a lot of it myself.

We all idolize sports figures, and we see them fall from grace. You just truly never know anybody anymore.

The public loves to create a hero....Sometimes I think they do it for the sheer joy of knocking him down from the highest peak. Like a child who builds a house of blocks and then destroys it with one vicious kick.

Label celebrity a consumer society's most precious consumer product, and eventually it becomes the hero with a thousand faces, the packaging of the society's art and politics, the framework of its commerce, and the stuff of its religion.

Celebrity-worship and hero-worship should not be confused. Yet we confuse them every day, and by doing so we come dangerously close to depriving ourselves of all real models. We lose sight of the men and women who do not simply seem great because they are famous but are famous because they are great. We come closer and closer to degrading all fame into notoriety.

Celebrity! It's become the most disgusting word on the planet. It makes me sick to my stomach.

Any star can be devoured by human adoration, sparkle by sparkle.

I find fame to be quite unnatural. Humans are not built for extreme adoration.

I never really looked up to celebrities when I was young.

I don't believe in hero worship.

I find it strange the way human nature wants heroes and yet wants to destroy their heroes. It's a kind of mass insecurity people want something to look up to and get a buzz off but, at the same time, want to destroy it because it makes them feel insecure.

The cult of the hero is the absolutely necessary complement of the massification of society. We see the automatic creation of this cult in connection with champion athletes, movie stars, and even such abstractions as Davy Crockett in the United States....

I find the most normal things about famous people to be the most fascinating.

The media will build you up in a hurry but then, just as fast, will bring you down.

The process of seeking fame is a process of seeking dehumanization. You are looking for it. You want it. But you only want the good parts of it. You want the part where people see you as just a collection of positive things and nothing else.

There's only one thing people love more than their heroes, and that's stomping them into the ground.

We Americans are childish about our celebrities and icons. We worship, then we denounce; we identify passionately with them and then, if they do something - anything - we dislike, we cast them off.

In a land where sport is sacred, Where the labourer is God, You must pander to the people, Make a hero of a clod.

In fame's temple there is always a niche to be found for rich dunces, importunate scoundrels, or successful butchers of the human race.

Heroes, it would seem, exist always and a certain worship of them.

When you're famous you kind of run into human nature in a raw kind of way. It stirs up envy, fame does.

Mankind has always made too much of its saints and heroes, and how the latter handle the fuss might be called their final test.