Politics & Power Quote by Charlton Heston

Heston is taking aim at a cultural machine that flatters itself as meritocratic while running on something more intimate: reciprocity. "Their pals vote for their stuff" is less an accusation than a diagnosis of how prestige circulates - not through broad public persuasion, but through tight professional ecosystems where favors, alliances, and shared taste quietly set the agenda. The line lands because it turns the supposedly elevated realm of panels and prizes into something bluntly human: cliques.

The sharper barb is his swipe at "fringe artists" and the dismissal of "anything before the 20th century". This is Heston, the monument of midcentury Hollywood and classical storytelling, watching the culture arbiters shift toward modernism, experimentation, and institutional novelty. He frames that shift as a kind of historical amnesia, where the past is treated not as a living archive but as dead weight. The subtext is generational: a star whose authority was built on epics, canon, and craft senses the ground moving under him, and he suspects the new rules are designed by and for insiders who find legitimacy in being "advanced."

"This is out of date" is the kicker, because it can be read two ways. He means the system is obsolete, corrupted by insularity. But he also inadvertently echoes what his critics likely felt about him: that his own sensibility belonged to an older order. The quote works because it captures that cultural knife-edge moment when "progress" starts sounding like exclusion, and "tradition" starts sounding like a grievance.