Kevin Young Quotes

I think Barnum is at the center of American culture. He's helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. He invented pretty much our notions of the circus.

Kevin Young

• American
• Pretty
• Culture

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Quotes to Explore

• I had no intention of becoming a performer, and yet under miraculous circumstances I was brought into the music industry fold. If divine powers hadn't intervened, I'd still be living in China working in some area of Sino-American comparative law.

  

  Abigail Washburn
  • Music
  • American
  • Law

• The mission of the press is to spread culture while destroying the attention span.

  

  Karl Kraus
  • Culture
  • Attention
  • Mission

• Winning is great, but being able to finish my last Olympic Games on American soil was very important. Even though I was injured, I didn't let my psyche get the best of me and cause me to doubt myself, so I was willing to pull every muscle in my body in '96 in order to get the job done and I came away with the bronze medal.

  

  Jackie Joyner-Kersee
  • Great
  • Important
  • Done

• I don't care how many championships you've won or how many records you've broken - if you've had a hand in pushing forward not only a game but women in sport's movement, then I think that's pretty darn good.

  

  Abby Wambach
  • Good
  • Women
  • Game

• I've never had to explain 'Prometheus' to people, ever. Most people get it.

  

  Idris Elba
  • People
  • Never
  • Explain

• Film is very much a universal and common voice, and we can't limit it to one particular culture.

  

  Abbas Kiarostami
  • Culture
  • Voice
  • Limit

• Radical thought has inspired many of the great political and social reform movements in American history, from ending slavery to establishing the minimum wage.

  

  Carl Bernstein
  • Great
  • American
  • History

• I always wanted the films to play in malls, and I wanted as many people as possible to see them. I never want them to be marginalized in the kind of rarefied, elitist world. I always have hopes that the films will permeate culture in a big way. A lot of times, I'm wrong, but it's always the hope.

  

  Harmony Korine
  • People
  • World
  • Hope

• A lot of people don't realize that hair is a big thing for a lot of people, not just African-American women. It's something to be aware of and to be cautious of.

  

  Zendaya
  • People
  • Women
  • American

• Robert De Niro... It seemed like a pretty cool thing to do to put his name on my resume next.

  

  Famke Janssen
  • Pretty
  • Cool
  • Name

• I think I've always had a 40-year-old body, and now that I'm actually there I'm like, 'Hey, pretty good, huh?'

  

  Felicity Huffman
  • Good
  • Think
  • Pretty

• I really identified with Pocahontas' struggles as a young woman trying to identify herself in a modern, changing world and trying to stay true to her culture and heritage.

  

  Q'orianka Kilcher
  • World
  • Trying
  • True

• In order to be universal, you have to be rooted in your own culture.

  

  Abbas Kiarostami
  • You
  • Culture
  • Order

• My last two records that I made were both quite pointed in one direction and I think I do my best stuff when it's all over the map, when there's a couple traditional things, a couple pretty rocking things.

  

  Vince Gill
  • Think
  • Pretty
  • Best

• I have met hundreds of young people doing just what George Romney did: using a hand up in tough times to become part of the American Dream.

  

  R. T. Rybak
  • People
  • Up
  • American

• I have profoundly mixed feelings about the Affordable Care Act. What I love about it is its impulse. It attempts to deal with this intractable problem in American health care life, which is that a significant portion of the population does not have access to quality medical care.

  

  Malcolm Gladwell
  • Life
  • Love
  • American

• I'm hoping that the administration and other thought leaders will succeed eventually in bringing the country back to the older idea that the American dream is having a career, getting a job, and getting involved in it, and doing well. That was the core of the good life.

  

  Edmund Phelps
  • Life
  • Good
  • Country

• World events can shape culture. Music is either a soundtrack for or a narration of changing times. And who knows how that's going to go?

  

  L.A. Reid
  • World
  • Music
  • Culture

• Three or four years ago a distinguished Frenchman, M. Hovelacque, published an article on America in the Revue de Paris in which he maintained that the essential weakness of our American civilization lay in the failure of our education to produce any equivalent of the superior man of Confucius or the καλὸς κἀγαθός of the Greeks.

  

  Irving Babbitt
  • American
  • America
  • Education

• Warhol and other Pop artists had brought the art religion of art for art's sake to an end. If art was only business, then rock expressed that transcendental, religious yearning for communal, nonmarket esthetic feeling that official art denied. For a time during the seventies, rock culture became the religion of the avant-garde art world.

  

  Dan Graham
  • World
  • Art
  • Culture

• I've always thrived under the pressure of the big games. I enjoy that, and there's nothing I get afraid about.

  

  Dele Alli

• Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.

  

  J. G. Ballard
  • Writing
  • Career
  • Ambition

• The Israeli mentality was totally different to mine. They just didn't understand people like me. They couldn't understand why I had been in a ghetto. We were totally different.

  

  Edgar Hilsenrath
  • Different
  • Understand
  • Ghetto

• I think Barnum is at the center of American culture. He's helping to invent what we now think of as pop culture. He invented pretty much our notions of the circus.

  

  Kevin Young
  • American
  • Pretty
  • Culture