Quotes on Popular

The big cop-out would be to accept popularity rather than opting to try to create potent work. It's so easy to do the popular thing, the expected thing, and that's where you start to cheat yourself - and your fans, in the end - because there's an inherent dishonesty in pandering and dishing up what everyone's expecting.

There's no difference in a lot of people's minds between good musicians and popular musicians.

Equal protection under the law - for race, religion, gender or sexual orientation - should not be subject to the most popular sentiments of the day.

Gymnastics should be popular everywhere; you just need the right person to start the right programme.

A sympathetic parent might see the spark of consciousness in a baby's large eyes and eagerly accept the popular claim that babies are wonderful learners, but it is hard to avoid the impression that they begin as ignorant as bread loaves.

I've always had an unsentimental view. I don't think the BBC is my auntie. I worked there for years, and you learn that they don't love you for yourself. They'll use you as long as you're popular. You shouldn't wait until it starts to wane. It can sometimes end badly.

There's a popular image of people who don't save for the future as lacking in self-control. But the reason saving is so hard has less to do with self-control and more to do with a scarcity of attention.

I wasn't a jazz player, but a classical musician, and I improvised arrangements of popular songs using classical motifs.

For 60 years, I was the most controversial figure in the country, and suddenly, I'm the most popular man in the land. Truth be told, I don't know when I was happier: then or now.

I kept thinking, I'm not going to do political journalism, because there's no way to keep my principles and be a political journalist, so I'll edit a popular science magazine. This will be my salvation, and I'll emerge with my integrity intact. That didn't even happen.

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular, but one must take it because it is right.

I see it as my job to try to make history to be a popular thing. The longer I keep going the less weird it will be to be a female historian.

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation - or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays - is like a blind man's dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.

I'm so proud to see that I went through an era when it wasn't popular to be an African-American quarterback. Then, to see how things have turned around. It's not about the African-American quarterback. It's about the quarterback who has an ability to do everything.

What is the most popular scene in the Bible? Adam and Eve biting the apple. It's not there.

There's a popular saying that the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Desire and innovation will trump policy, the argument goes, as clever programmers circumvent controls.

I would rather write or record something great and have it overlooked than do mediocre work and have it be popular.

Wars are usually really popular with people that aren't gonna be affected by them. 'Cause it's just entertainment, and it's just weird, like, 'Well, we've got to show the world that we're strong.' No we don't. And by the way, that has nothing to do with you. Why are you equating yourself with that... you know what I mean?

It's a great thing that the United States has given the rest of the world - no other country has given such great popular music to the Far East and Europe. When I play those great countries, a lot of times, the audience starts singing the songs with me. They know them. They love them.

Race is the true protagonist of the American novel. Our most popular classic fictions have known this, from 'Moby Dick' to 'Beloved;' all these books take on race or talk it out, often in other forms; they are less 'horror stories for boys' than ghost stories from a haunted conscience.

Nothing could be more dangerous than following the popular maxim whereby it is the spirit of the law that must be consulted. This is an embankment that, once broken, gives way to a torrent of opinions.