The average commercial radio listener in America is not looking for lofty, intellectual subjects. This isn't brain surgery. It's about striking the passion of the people.
When you're young, you look at television and think, there's a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want.
My work is not a piece of writing designed to meet the taste of an immediate public, but was done to last for ever.
The public, obviously, they takes things in a very simplest fashion and so they should. That's why we have such wonderful television.
Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.
All truth is valuable, and satirical criticism may be considered as useful when it rectifies error and improves judgment; he that refines the public taste is a public benefactor.
There are those who blame the Press, but in this I think they are mistaken. The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.
3rd Earl Russell of Kingston
We make our own music, and the songs appeal to the public well, and the public likes them.
I've never believed in cheapening music by going according to what some people think is public taste.
Popular culture is simply a reflection of what the majority seems to want.
Some of the vintage comedy on Radio 4 Extra wasn't very funny to begin with, whereas some things just get funnier regardless of the changes in public attitudes over the years.
Torture will give a dozen pence or more To keep a drab from bawling at his door. The public taste is quite a different thing Torture is positively paid to sing.
In the mainstream film market, certainly in television, sex is handled fairly discreetly. I think the abuse of extraordinarily graphic violence and language presses much closer to the tolerance of public taste.
Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.
The Press is such as the public demands, and the public demands bad newspapers because it has been badly educated.
I feel I have a political duty to reach out to the general public. I want to make films that the people want to see. So if the people want to see Johnny Depp or Tom Cruise, then it is really my job to incorporate them into my films.
Never hate a song that's sold a half million copies.
I have always tried to perform the music I love, and I think I am lucky because my preferences are often the ones of the public.
Every time I make a picture the critics' estimate of American public taste goes down ten percent.
Popular music is popular because a lot of people like it.
It's that experienced eye that knows what the public loves and how to create that Hollywood magic that drives pop culture.
Television is not vulgar because people are vulgar; it is vulgar because people are similar in their prurient interests and sharply differentiated in their civilized concerns.
If you hear something you like, and you're halfway like the public, chances are they'll like it too.
Audiences will get just as tired of people wrestling on a bed as they did of Tom Mix kissing his horse.
Anything that's on television as often as someone on 'The X Factor' is what's successful. That doesn't mean that I condone that or think that it's right. To be honest, I'd be the first to say I think it's a shame. But if that's the way it is then that's the way it is.
