#popularity

Roo: What’s your definition of popularity? Hutch: I used to think people were popular because they were good-looking, or nice, or funny, or good at sports. Roo: Aren’t they? Hutch: I’d think, if I could just be those things, I’d – you know – have more friends than I do. But in seventh grade, when Jackson and those guys stopped hanging out with me, I tried as hard as I could to get them to like me again. But then . . . (shaking his head as if to clear it) I don’t really wanna talk about it. Roo: What happened? Hutch: They just did some ugly stuff to me is all. And really, it was for the best. Roo: Why? Hutch: Because I was cured. I realized the popular people weren’t nice or funny or great-looking. They just had power, and they actually got the power by teasing people or humiliating them – so people bonded to them out of fear. Roo: Oh. Hutch: I didn’t want to be a person who could act like that. I didn’t want to ever speak to any person who could act like that. Roo: Oh Hutch: So then I wasn’t trying to be popular anymore. Roo: Weren’t you lonely? Hutch: I didn’t say it was fun. (He bites his thumbnail, bonsai dirt and all.) I said it was for the best. ↗

— E. Lockhart

#friends #loneliness #popularity #funny

Some people really trip on success or popularity. My friends would talk to me about that, about tripping on all this stuff, but you know what I tripped on? I started buying property. ↗

— Roy Ayers

#buying #friends #i #know #me

So remember those who win the game Lose the love they sought to gain In debitures of quality and dubious integrity Their small-town eyes will gape at you In dull surprise when payment due Exceeds accounts received at seventeen ↗

— Janis Ian

#life #loneliness #maturity #popularity #youth

See how he cowers and sneaks, how vaguely all the day he fears, not being immortal nor divine, but the slave and prisoner of his own opinion of himself, a fame won by his own deeds. Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate. ↗

— Henry David Thoreau

#reputation #fame

The presidency is more than a popularity contest. ↗

— Al Gore

#more #popularity #popularity contest #presidency #than

Mom and Pop were proud of my popularity, but from their point of view, show business was no way to make a living. ↗

— Ethel Merman

#living #make #mom #point #point of view

You're an island no matter what you do. I think it's very dangerous to use popularity as your identity in life. So you have to really know who you are inside, the core person, and follow what is true rather than follow what is hype. ↗

— Donny Osmond

#dangerous #follow #hype #i #i think

When I got into rap I didn't exactly win any popularity contests. I called myself Dee Dee King, after B.B. King, to the total dismay of my fellow Ramones. ↗

— Dee Dee Ramone

#any #called #contests #dismay #exactly

No, I always felt that amongst my core fans- because there was a level of popularity that I had in the mid '80s that was sort of a bump on the scale- they fundamentally understood the values that are at work in my work. ↗

— Bruce Springsteen

#amongst #because #bump #core #felt

When I launched the development of the GNU system, I explicitly said the purpose of developing this system is so we can use our computers and have freedom, thus if you use some other free system instead but you have freedom, then it's a success. It's not popularity for our code but it's success for our goal. ↗

— Richard Stallman

#computers #developing #development #explicitly #free