Entertainment Culture Quotes

When I was younger, there was the sex thing. That's par for the course.When you're a movie star, it went with it. It's a kind of rite of passage, socially.

There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology... the new way of killing time.

It's important to remember that, first and foremost, if not only, this is entertainment. 'The West Wing' isn't meant to be good for you.

There are millions of Americans who belong by nature in movie theaters as they belong at political rallies or in fortuneteller parlors and on the shoot-the-chutes. To these millions, the movies are a sort of boon - a gaudier version of religion.

People in the States live for finding something they can lose their minds over. They have nothing else going on. They watch a show and there's a joke and everybody's up in arms.

You have come to earth to entertain and to be entertained.

When I was a kid going into the movies, you weren't force-fed information everywhere you looked about what the movie was going to be.

Our society, like decadent Rome, has turned into an amusement society, with writers chief among the court jesters

The man who first brought ruin upon the Roman people was he who pampered them by largesses and amusements.

America is the first culture in jeopardy of amusing itself to death.

I think there ought to be some serious discussion by smart people, really smart people, about whether or not proliferation of things like The Smoking Gun and TMZ and YouTube and the whole celebrity culture is healthy. We've switched from a culture that was interested in manufacturing, economics, politics - trying to play a serious part in the world - to a culture that's really entertainment-based. I mean, I know people who can tell you who won the last four seasons on American Idol and they don't know who their [bleeping] Representatives are.

America is a nation of 270 million people: 100 million of them are gangsters, another 100 million are hustlers, 50 million are complete lunatics, and every single one of us is secretly in show business. Isn't that fabulous?

. . . Americans are the best entertained and quite likely the least well-informed people in the Western world.

The healthcare reform bill now includes a tanning booth tax of 10 percent. You know what this means? This whole thing could be funded by the cast of 'Jersey Shore.'

For the message of television as metaphor is not only that all the world is a stage but that the stage is located in Las Vegas, Nevada.

The church that can't worship must be entertained. And leaders who can't lead a church to worship must provide the entertainment.

The age of printed pamphlets and political essays has long since been replaced by television, a distracting and absorbing medium which seems determined to entertain itself more than it informs and educates.

When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience, and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk; culture-death is a clear possibility.

Over the epitaph of this generation it will say ENTERTAINED TO DEATH.

When people say that L.A. doesn't have a culture, I think it really does: a very old culture, and very specific. There's streets named after entertainers, and statues of entertainers, and it's great. Entertainment is still art, even if it makes billions of dollars. So it's like a city built on entertainment, and art in a way.

We have to get families back in the game, get back where Saturday night, everything stops. A case of beer comes out and a bottle of rye and anyone who comes to the house, they better want to watch hockey.

Today's audience knows more about what's on television than what's in life.

Mass communication communicates massively: its language lacks precise articulation and avoids demanding terms; it argues for the kind of behavior in life which will make a "good program": ethic equals showbiz.

The newspapers and magazines, the theaters and the social reform movements, are more and more made for a public which looks only to be entertained and which has lost the power of sustained attention.

I would consider myself a casual fan growing up because obviously wrestling was such a huge part of pop culture, and still is. I was a fan as much as it was a part of pop culture.