Popularity Quotes

“Oscar Wilde once said, “Whatever is popular is wrong.”
― Pooja Agnihotri, 17 Reasons Why Businesses Fail :Unscrew Yourself From Business Failure

“Our work is rejected because we are actually interested in the truth. Not a good look! People are “ashamed and embarrassed” by our work because, like Nietzsche’s work, it’s full of “difficult” material. Nietzsche was totally ignored during his sane life. Even today, the common herd don’t have a clue who he is. Leibniz, humanity’s greatest genius, is more or less unknown. That’s the way it goes. Our work is suffering the same fate. Well, it’s no surprise. We refused to play the Mandarin game. We refused to comply with the herd. Like true philosophers, we prefer to be Sages and Gadflies. The masses killed Socrates. Everyone that refuses to share our work is passing us the hemlock. So be it! We have total contempt for people that claim to like our work, but wouldn’t be seen dead sharing it on social media. You must be able to stand with those making difficult arguments that the herd don’t like. We disagree with Nietzsche on all manner of things, but we would certainly stand shoulder to shoulder with him against the herd. It’s essential for Gadflies to exist to shake the masses out of their complacency. Yet the Gadflies are always hated and, in the end, they are always handed the hemlock. They are the true heroes of our world, the ones that never get any credit.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Stupidity is most often concealed by education, fame, adulthood, beauty, affluence, popularity, sexiness, old age, authority, and a suit.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It is not fashionable where I am not.”
― Dorothea Lieven, Letters of Dorothea, Princess Lieven, During Her Residence in London, 1812-1834

“Soon you will have forgotten all things: soon all things will have forgotten you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

“...and his desperation had made him cruel.”
― Sally Rooney, Normal People

“Popularity is just a good way of saying a lot of people like you a little. Not that real people like you a lot.”
― Laura Greenwood, First Time's a Charm

“A Girl Mozart Startles the World of Chess.”
― Walter Tevis, The Queen's Gambit

“Popularity is the crown of laurel which the world puts on bad art. Whatever is popular is wrong.”
― Oscar Wilde, Lecture to Art Students

“Being an ignoramus is not enough to prevent one from being famous.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“There is no sense in refusing honours. That is in fact to do them too much honour. The only strategy is to act so that they never weigh upon you.

Your delicious (and malicious) certainty that you are a beautiful woman only subjugates yourself. How is one to approach her to be subjugated oneself?

It seems difficult to meet the woman of your life when you have several (lives). In fact, as soon as you have a double life . . .

Popular fame is what we should aspire to. Nothing will ever match the distracted gaze of the woman serving in the butcher's who has seen you on television.

With their feet caught in the ice like the pink flamingos, they still thought they were God's gift to mankind.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

“When I was a child, my father forbade me to read science fiction or fantasy. Trash of the highest order, he said. He didn't want me muddying up my young, impressionable mind with crap. If it wasn't worthy of being reviewed in the Times, it did not make it onto our bookshelves.
So while my classmates gleefully dove into The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, A Wrinkle in Time, and The Borrowers, I was stuck reading Old Yeller.
My saving grace- I was the most popular girl in my class. That's not saying much; it was easy to be popular at that age. All you had to do was wear your hair in French braids, tell your friends your parents let you drink grape soda every night at dinner, and take any dare. I stood in a bucket of hot water for five minutes without having to pee. I ate four New York System wieners (with onions) in one sitting. I cut my own bangs and- bam!- I was queen of the class.
As a result I was invited on sleepovers practically every weekend, and it was there that I cheated. I skipped the séances and the Ouija board. I crept into my sleeping bag with a flashlight, zipped it up tight, and pored through those contraband books. I fell into Narnia. I tessered with Meg and Charles Wallace; I lived under the floorboards with Arrietty and Pod.
I think it was precisely because those books were forbidden that they lived on in me long past the time that they should have. For whatever reason, I didn't outgrow them. I was constantly on the lookout for the secret portal, the unmarked door that would lead me to another world.
I never thought I would actually find it.”
― Melanie Gideon, Valley of the Moon

“Only people who have a world-historical perspective can change history. The average person has only a domestic, ahistorical perspective. Look at social media. It’s full of people without a clue what’s going on. Immense historical forces have been unleashed all around them, and all they care about is posting their brain-dead, vacuous observations and their self-pitying, whining woe-is-me statements about how shitty their lives are and how no one understands them. As well as countless memes and selfies, of course. You just have to love those lolcats on skateboards, right, hoomans? They are forever trapped in their parochial little world of trivia. Why are our books so unsuccessful? It’s because they announce, with the volume of Stentor at Troy, a world-historic agenda, but we are surrounded by pygmies who stare at us like cows in line at the abattoir.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“Social media is the supreme triumph of the commonplace, the undiluted voice of the commonplace, the perfect means of viral transmission of the commonplace. All excellence is tracked down and exterminated. The commonplace infects everything. It grows like weeds everywhere and strangles all beautiful, exceptional flowers. All tall poppies are all cut down.”
― Joe Dixon, The Mandarin Effect: The Crisis of Meaning

“All truly famous people wish fame had a switch.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“I would rather be ostracized than assimilated! I read recently that my greatest accomplishment was my unerring ability to make myself unpopular.”
― Reinhold Messner, My Life at the Limit

“The temptation that Jesus resisted in the wildreness [a crown without a cross; worldly glory], many of us, His followers, still long for.”
― Philip Yancey, The Jesus I Never Knew

“When doe something truly become popular? And I don't mean "popular" in the sense that it succeeds,: I mean popular in the sense that the specific thing's incontrovertible popularity is the most important thing about it. I mean "popular" in the way Pet Rocks were popular in 1975, or the way E.T. was popular in 1982, or the way Oprah Winfrey was popular for most of the nineties.

The answer to this question is both obvious and depressing: Something becomes truly popular when it becomes interesting to those who don't particularly care. You don't create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who love movies. You create a phenomenon like E.T. by appealing to people who see one movie a year.”
― Chuck Klosterman, But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

“Fame is the measure of neither character nor wisdom.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Some people are gone, but not forgotten. Some are still here, but already forgotten.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“It is easier to earn fame than earning a fortune.”
― Amit Kalantri, Wealth of Words

“When popular people die, friends or fans only remember them when they die, but rarely during the years leading up to their death or even a week after. We enjoy the latest updates and gadgets, but rarely go back to older versions of something even if it was better. We are a very superficial race. Even animals are more humane than were are.”
― Suzy Kassem

“If you are more worried about the numbers I have online over the content I put up and that becomes the deciding factor in connecting with me learning from me or working with me, then we wouldn't work together well.”
― Loren Weisman

“Life is not a popularity contest.”
― Adrienne Posey

“Don't sell yourself short, young man,' he said sternly. 'These people don't need charisma. They need hard work and the truth- exactly what you've given them. ... Popularity isn't everything. In fact, it isn't anything when you get right down to it. The majority is rarely right.”
― Karen Hancock, Arena

“the trouble with the unthinkable is that it's pretty unpopular”
― Simon Mayo, Itch Rocks

“Hornblower knew that the men were cursing him under their breath; he did not know they admired him as well, as men will admire a hard master despite themselves.”
― C.S. Forester, Beat to Quarters

“In a way, the boys- is- what makes a girl popular… to a point; and the popular girls are what displays which guys you want to be with. Yes, like girls want to have what is already been taken, it’s the challenge of taking them away from another girl.

Just like girls that have popular girlfriends, before you… they can get you higher up on the invisible list if you fall for them as they want, and by hooking you up. Why because they have been there already. How you get popular is all on you. Plus, what you’re willing to do and willing to give up. If you have no friends or don’t know the predominant boys in your life, then you’re not going to be as prevalent in high school. If you fall to your knees and party your ass off, you just might rank on the list. Like I said- what you give, is what you get. Popularity and hooking up, all go hand and hand.

(#-Hashtag: cheap thrills, one-night stands, and what happened to just hold hands)”
― Marcel Ray Duriez, Nevaeh Falling too You

“Someone once told me that flaws are what give people real beauty”
― Michele Jaffe

“We sometimes unknowingly reveal that we are stupid by wondering aloud why, if they are really wise or intelligent, is someone not rich or famous.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana