53 Popularity Quotes

If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves.

When the leaders choose to make themselves bidders at an auction of popularity, their talents, in the construction of the state, will be of no service. They will become flatterers instead of legislators; the instruments, not the guides, of the people.

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.

I was very much in my own world, never the popular kid. But I had a great family, a great brother and mother.

I am clearly more popular than Reagan. I am in my third term. Where's Reagan? Gone after two! Defeated by George Bush and Michael Dukakis no less.

If the public likes you, you're good. Shakespeare was a common, down-to-earth writer in his day.

When people laugh at Mickey Mouse, it's because he's so human; and that is the secret of his popularity.

The quarrel between Hume and Rousseau is symbolic: Rousseau was mad but influential, Hume was sane but had no followers.

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

The politician in my country seeks votes, affection and respect, in that order:. With few notable exceptions, they are simply men who want to be loved.

Those big-shot writers ... could never dig the fact that there are more salted peanuts consumed than caviar.

My skin is more beautiful than yours. I would be quite more popular in jail if I so chose. (February 4, 2002 interview by Terry Gross with Gene Simmons on NPR's Fresh Air)

Jane Monheit is skyrocketing up the jazz charts. By next year, we won't be able to get her. (comment from Allison Stockel, artistic director of the Ridgefield [Connecticut] Playhouse)

Being an actress doesn't make you popular in school. I was always leaving to make a movie then coming back in.

If you just set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing.

The most successful politician is he who says what everybody is thinking most often and in the loudest voice.

Arthur was the last of the three great theatrical voices of the American century - O'Neill, Williams, Miller. ... Arthur's special achievement was to make political and social plays which belonged on Broadway and yet were also powered to reach out into America and way beyond.

'The fact that Pinhead is a character that audiences want to watch, that women find sexy, that people have tattooed on their own bodies, I think, is perfectly extraordinary, and I'm incredibly pleased about it. I don't think an analysis of what he does in the movies ever completely illuminates the charm that the guy has.

Your average game show host on TV, for instance, doesn't believe himself to be banal. He actually thinks that he's quite interesting. And if you look at the viewing figures, so do an enormous number of people in this country.

'I knew that if it ever came down to one of us running for president, we'd get a hell of a lot of votes.'

Not at all; not at all... as is obvious now; now they admit that. He was hated by political opponents as he suppressed all opposition political forces, but he wasn't hated by the ordinary Iraqi - no, not at all.

Perhaps the absense of glamour contributed to my popularity. It may be that audiences felt comfortable with an actress who seemed cozy, approachable, unlike the flamboyant leading ladies I once knew in the theater.

I never did understand the resentment about Country artists 'going pop'. Either you've got what it takes to appeal to a whole lot of people, or you don't.

Disturbers are never popular -- nobody ever really loved an alarm clock in action-no matter how grateful they may have been afterwards for its kind services!

The kindergarten essay got into that underground press we all belong to where something just sort of has a life of its own and moves around and it gets on refrigerators and in the work place and people copy it... I was a minister in the Unitarian church at the time and teaching and I was ready to stop that and do the next phase of my life. So I had quit both those jobs and I was all set up with my studio in Seattle when this other horse came riding by ... I'm not a great writer and I'll never get the Nobel Prize or a Pulitzer Prize but I've won the refrigerator door award. And you don't see Faulkner on people's refrigerator.

No one goes there any more, it's too crowded.

I took a chance on 'Nature Boy', though I think 'Lost April' is a much better song. The public liked 'Nature Boy' because it was something different.

I don't know why everyone on earth felt so close to that guy; he was beloved and endearing and inoffensive in some weird way. For all his screaming and all of his darkness, he was just lovable.

Feingold won big after voting against the Iraq war and Bush's tax cuts, and having cast the lone vote in the Senate against the Patriot Act

...one of the most charismatic politicians in Britain, a true man of the people.

...so unpopular, if he became a funeral director people would stop dying

How can such a disproportionately large number of people have a definite, and unusually positive relationship to Mozart? ~ Wolfgang Hildesheimer