1980s Quotes

A few years back, when my style was 'punk grandma,' I picked up an amazing pair of sandals - orthopaedic ones, with really thick soles. I've given them away to a friend now, because these days my look is more '1980s substitute teacher gone wild.' ~ Beth Ditto

During the mid-1980s dairy farmers decided there was too much cheap milk at the supermarket. So the government bought and slaughtered 1.6 million dairy cows. How come the government never does anything like this with lawyers? ~ P. J. O'Rourke

In the 1980s ... it was a liberal philosophy of government that changed the rules to suit its own political ends. We were forfeiting our freedoms to conform to a humanistic philosophy that was patently antireligious. ~ James G. Watt

When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal. ~ Salman Rushdie

Since becoming an alleged adult, I've always felt like I should exercise - or should at least want to exercise - and make a feeble attempt at health, thus staving off terrible things like the coronary heart disease and high cholesterol described to me in 1980s margarine commercials. ~ Ali Liebegott

When I started out as a music journalist, at the end of the 1980s, it was generally assumed that we were living through the lamest music era the world would ever see. But those were also the years when hip-hop exploded, beatbox disco soared, indie rock took off, and new wave invented a language of teen angst. ~ Rob Sheffield

I was kind of freaked out by the art world in the 1980s. Just the money thing. All the competition over artists. ~ Kim Gordon

Putin learned from reading the William King and David Cleland textbook in the 1980s and 1990s, planning for uncertainty is the most important element of strategy. ~ Clifford G. Gaddy

It seems to me that one of the things that happened with a lot of literary fiction in the 1980s and 1990s was that it became very concerned with the academy and less with how people live their lives. We got to a point where the crime novel stepped into the breach. It was also a time when the crime novel stopped being so metropolitan. ~ Val McDermid

In the 1980s and 1990s, Jack Welch, the CEO of General Electric, laid off over 100,000 employees. His reward? When he retired from GE, he received a golden parachute of over $400 million dollars. This is the kind of corporate greed and irresponsibility that is destroying the middle class and must be ended. ~ Bernie Sanders

The computer environment is radically different today. In the 1980s, it was like the Wild West, with a lot of open territory. Now, the cowboys have moved out and the farmers have moved in. ~ Mitch Kapor

She'd permed her hair to within an inch of its life. When she moved her head, the mass of hair followed along behind her a split second later.
Perhaps you had to live through the late 70's, early 80's to appreciate this. ~ Jean Thompson

Although computer chips now are thinner, they're more powerful, they're not as reliable. You'd harvest computer chips from the 1980s from all around the world because they're reliable. ~ Danny Boyle

The 1980s: feminism, postmodernism, sexual/textual politics

While it might be tempting to generalise that Woolf 's writing was being discussed almost in two separate camps during the 1980s, formalists on the one hand, and feminists on the other, this would be to simplify things too far.
Many critics were attempting to make sense of and connect her feminist politics with her modernist practices. Such investigations coincided with the explosion of theory in literary studies, and once again the work of Virginia
Woolf was central to the framing of many of the major theoretical developments in literary critical engagements with feminism, postmodernism, deconstruction and psychoanalysis. In the context of the rise of 'high theory'
and the questioning of old-school Marxist, materialist, humanist and historicist literary theories, Woolf studies wrestled with the locating of her radical feminist politics in the avant-garde qualities of the text itself, and its endlessly transgressive play of signifiers, with the Woolfian inscription of radically deconstructed models of the self and of sexuality and jouissance. ~ Jane Goldman

And it was back in the mid-1980s, and as I point out in a piece, that was when we are spending about eight percent of our gross domestic product on health care. And even then, we had the impression that so much of the excessive, aggressive medical treatment that took place at the end of life was not only unnecessary but it was cruel. ~ Richard Dooling

I remember the early 1980s, when I first got one of these fabulous film critic jobs. The downside was sitting through 'Splatteria III: The Dismembering of the Clampett Clan' or 'The Oklahoma Meatgrinder Massacre' or some such. The headaches unleashed by watching attractive kids die week after week after week cannot be imagined. ~ Stephen Hunter

Or we could change the definition in another way. We could remove the part of the definition that refers to "supernatural powers." Then sorcery and witchcraft would include beliefs that unknown persons harm others using techniques that cannot be demonstrated to be real or that are not observable. In the United States, Senator Joseph McCarthy played on people's fears in the 1950s by claiming that the government and Hollywood were filled with Communists dedicated to overturning all that Americans hold dear. In the 1980s and 1990s, various supremacists blamed certain political factions and minorities for social problems and what they believed to be the degeneration of their nation's values. Will there be other witch hunts in the twenty-first century? ~ James Peoples

There is a way to practice hard and be physical without pads. You can still be a physical football team and be efficient in practice without pads. The 49ers practiced like that for a long period of time in the 1980s under Bill Walsh and were extremely successful when all the other teams were practicing in pads. ~ Jimmy Johnson

If you've heard of Freezy Freakies gloves, Hans and Karl Reichstetter know this about you: You were probably born in the 1970s or early 1980s and you probably spent your childhood in the Northeast. ~ Anonymous

Quotes › Authors › D › Damian Barr › The stories we tell ourselves about...

The stories we tell ourselves about ourselves are very often not really what happened. And as I started to write stuff down, I started to challenge what I thought I knew about myself, my culture, my family, all of it. It was a huge, destroying process that completely took over my life. I just wasn't here, I mean I was physically present, but I wasn't here, I was back in the 1980s. ~ Damian Barr

A lot of that, "Have you ever noticed that [specific Florida player] is like the [dated cultural reference] version of [obscure player from the middle 1980s] except that his [some ridiculous stoner concept about grizzly bears] has been filtered through the political ideology of [random indie artist currently on tour with Built to Spill]?" We all have to pay the rent, rockers. I know who I am. ~ Chuck Klosterman

During the 1980s, in California, a large number of Cambodian women went to their doctors with the same complaint: they could not see. The women were all war refugees. Before fleeing their homeland, they had witnessed the atrocities for which the Khmer Rouge, which had been in power from 1975 to 1979, was well known. Many of the women had been raped or tortured or otherwise brutalized. Most had seen family members murdered in front of them. One woman, who never again saw her husband and three children after soldiers came and took them away, said that she had lost her sight after having cried every day for four years. She was not the only one who appeared to have cried herself blind. Others suffered from blurred or partial vision, their eyes troubled by shadows and pains.

The doctors examined the women - about a hundred and fifty in all - found that their eyes were normal. Further tests showed that their brains were normal as well. If the women were telling the truth - and there were some who doubted this, who thought the women might be malingering because they wanted attention or were hoping to collect disability - the only explanation was psychosomatic blindness.

In other words, the women's minds, forced to take in so much horror and unable to take more, had managed to turn out the lights. ~ Sigrid Nunez

When I travel, I always take my Winsor & Newton watercolor kit, which is the size of a pack of cigarettes when folded up. I bought my first one in the 1980s. It was handy to bring on trips, and I packed it into a leather pouch along with a couple of brushes, a pencil, an eraser and paper. ~ Susan Minot

Sometime in the late 1980s the neurotic was replaced, as a cultural type, by the depressive, who understands his unhappiness not in terms of conflict but rather in terms of mood. Mood is taken to be a function of neurotransmitters, about which there's not much to say. Inarticulacy is baked into any description of the human being that we express in neuro-talk. ~ Matthew B. Crawford

One of the greatest investments of our lifetime has been New York City real estate, and investors made the highest returns when they bought stuff during the 1970s and 1980s when people were getting mugged. The lesson is that you make the most money when you buy stuff that's out of consensus. ~ Mary Meeker

Government observers, keen on getting the Penan out of the valuable hardwood forests, have claimed that Penan health is poor and that they are malnourished. This is a ploy to get them settled so they can be controlled. Also, it is a source of embarrassment to the governments of Malaysia and Indonesia that in the 1980s, nomadic hunters are still roaming the jungles. This doesn't help the national image of a modern, developing country. ~ Eric Hansen

They claim that autism naturally occurs at about 18 months, when the MMR is routinely given, so the association is merely coincidental and not causal. But the onset of autism at 18 months is a recent development. Autism starting at 18 months rose very sharply in the mid-1980s, when the MMR vaccine came into wide use. A coincidence? Hardly! ~ Bernard Rimland

Our tax policies, the tax relief and reform we passed in 2003 and 2005, helped get government out of the way of America's entrepreneurs, and our unemployment rate is now lower than it was in the 1970s, the 1980s, and the 1990s. ~ Marsha Blackburn

In the 1980s, when people were just beginning to talk about AIDS, there were just a few categories of those who were at high risk: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. We were the only ones identified by nationality. ~ Edwidge Danticat

In the 1950s kids lost their innocence.
They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, and lyrics in music that gave rise to a new term ---the generation gap.

In the 1960s, kids lost their authority.
It was a decade of protest---church, state, and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of me-ism dominated by hyphenated words beginning with self.
Self-image, Self-esteem, Self-assertion....It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and no one had the nerve to tell them there was a difference.

In the 1980s, kids lost their hope.
Stripped of innocence, authority and love and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.

In the 1990s kids lost their power to reason. Less and less were they taught the very basics of language, truth, and logic and they grew up with the irrationality of a postmodern world.

In the new millennium, kids woke up and found out that somewhere in the midst of all this change, they had lost their imagination. Violence and perversion entertained them till none could talk of killing innocents since none was innocent anymore. ~ Ravi Zacharias

I began graduate school in the late 1980s, and my goal was to understand how morality varied across cultures and nations. I did some research comparing moral judgment in India and the U.S.A. ~ Jonathan Haidt

Nearly thirty years on, despite Pejic's unpopularity with some feminists and the closet-cases who write for US FHM, 1980s Marilyn and his shameless, shining desire to be desired looks more like a glamorous prophet, preparing the way for the Metrosexy 21st Century. ~ Mark Simpson

Self-styled pioneers braved the dirt and crime of rundown neighborhoods where, in the early 1980s, they could buy as much as five thousand square feet in a dilapidated brownstone for as little as $25,000. ~ Jonathan Soffer

Every new generation of women, it seems, feminist and housewife alike, is encouraged by popular culture to disavow its forebears and rebrand itself as an all-new, never-before-seen generational phenomenon, completely different in every way from what came before. The 'housewives' of the 1970s gave way to the Martha Stewart 'homemakers' of the 1980s, then the 'soccer moms' of the 1990s, then the stay-at-home moms of the 2000s. Next may come the homeschooling homesteaders of the impending post-apocalypse - who knows? What's significant is that the cycle of idealization, devaluation, and revision gives an appearance of progress, of superficial change, that distracts us from the big picture. ~ Carina Chocano

the monetarists would have met with greater success if they had broadened their definition of money even further. Their mistake was to fail to see that there is no distinction between fiat money and credit. They should have included all dollar-denominated credit instruments in their definition of money. Or, put differently, they should have replaced money with credit in the equation of exchange, because by the 1980s there was less and less difference between the two. Now there is essentially none. ~ Richard Duncan

I had a great experience working with Dynamite on Masks, and had just gotten started on a stint on The Shadow with them when they floated the idea of a Captain Action series. I've been a little obsessed with the character since I was first introduced to him in the pages of Amazing Heroes back in the early 1980s. ~ Chris Roberson

When I look back at the 1980s I pinch myself. Did I really do all that? ~ Cynthia Payne

I was awkward-looking with huge brown eyes, dark brown, pencil-straight hair styled into an old-school Romanian bowl haircut from the 1980s. And I was very, very small. I was always the tiniest kid on my street and in my classes at school ... The gym was the one place I didn't have to worry about feeling awkward for being so petite. ~ Dominique Moceanu

Insofar as Americans have a popular image of postal workers, it has become increasingly squalid. But this didn't just happen. It is the result of intentional policy choices. Since the 1980s, legislators have led the way in systematically defunding the post office and encouraging private alternatives as part of an ongoing campaign to convince Americans that government doesn't really work. ~ David Graeber

Over the years, there have been a series of concepts developed to justify the use of force in international affairs for a long period. It was possible to justify it on the pretext, which usually turned out to have very little substance, that the U.S. was defending itself against the communist menace. By the 1980s, that was wearing pretty thin. ~ Noam Chomsky

By the 1980's and 1990's, Moore's Law had emerged as the underlying assumption that governed almost everything in the Valley, from technology to business, education, and even culture. The "law" said the number of transistors would double every couple of years. It dictated that nothing stays the same for more than a moment; no technology is safe from its successor; costs fall and computing power increases not at a constant rate but exponentially: If you're not running on what became known as " Internet time," you're falling behind. ~ John Markoff

surfing, writing, composing, and programming deep into the night, like it's the early 1980s with the hue of poison-green CRT illuminating the room, Nike running shoes on the floor, hair metal poster on the door, and everything is infinite, made of fibre optics and floppy disks . . . ~ Mike Walker

Mexico has experimented with political change since the late 1980s. ~ Enrique Pena Nieto

As an experienced editor, I disapprove of flashbacks, foreshadowings, and tricksy devices; they belong in the 1980s with M.A.s in postmodernism and chaos theory. ~ David Mitchell

When I think of the 1980s, the only color that comes to mind is a brown, yellowish color. I guess it's coming from my life experience, and it's melancholia and sadness and a bit of joy. ~ Denis Villeneuve

The 1980s was a time of the great recession of interactive entertainment. When Atari fell in 1982, until Nintendo launched its console, video games were an outcast for five years. ~ Bing Gordon

In Workers in a Lean World: Unions in the International Economy (Verso, 1997), Kim Moody cites studies finding an increase in stress-related workplace injuries and illness between the mid-1980s and the early 1990s. He argues that rising stress levels reflect a new system of "management by stress" in which workers in a variety of industries are being squeezed to extract maximum productivity, to the detriment of their health. ~ Barbara Ehrenreich

In the 1970's and in early 1980's, a startling discovery was made that almost every problem contains an element of solutions. ~ Insoo Kim Berg

In the 1980s, research on post traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans was regarded as important, noble, and useful. When the same researchers looked at the same problem in children who had been sexually abused, a tremendous controversy ensued a controversy that persists to this day. There were those who disputed the extent and severity of the sexual abuse that had been uncovered. ~ Patrick J. Carnes

All through the 1960s, success was determined by birth: which house or which last name you were born into. But over the next couple of decades, in the 1970s and 1980s, success was determined by education. Now, thankfully, talent has been given its own berth, ~ Raghu Ram

When I was a kid and started to be obsessed by art in the 1980s, the art world was in this polarity Warhol/Beuys, Beuys/Warhol. Both expended the notion of art extremely, but in very different ways. ~ Hans Ulrich Obrist

Police often think of themselves as soldiers in a battle with the public rather than guardians of public safety. That they are provided with tanks and other military-grade weapons, that many are military veterans, and that militarized units like Special Weapons and Tactics (SWAT) proliferated during the 1980s War on Drugs and post-9/11 War on Terror only fuels this perception, as well as a belief that entire communities are disorderly, dangerous, suspicious, and ultimately criminal. When this happens, police are too quick to use force. ~ Alex S. Vitale

During the 1980s, international interest in the Nicaraguan war was intense. No conflict since the Spanish civil war had provoked such passion around the world. It was a classic good-versus-evil war. ~ Stephen Kinzer

The idea that owning a gun in America was an individual right only dates to the 1980s. ~ Jay Parini

The Reagan-Bush years have exalted private gain over public obligation, special interests over the common good, wealth and fame over work and family. The 1980s ushered in a Gilded Age of greed and selfishness, of irresponsibility and excess, and of neglect. ~ William J. Clinton

I lived in New York City back in the 1980s, which is when the Bordertown series was created. New York was a different place then -- dirtier, edgier, more dangerous, but also in some ways more exciting. The downtown music scene was exploding -- punk and folk music were everywhere -- and it wasn't as expensive to live there then, so a lot of young artists, musicians, writers, etc. etc. were all living and doing crazy things in scruffy neighborhoods like the East Village.

I was a Fantasy Editor for a publishing company back then -- but in those days, "fantasy" to most people meant "imaginary world" books, like Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. A number of the younger writers in the field, however, wanted to create a branch of fantasy that was rooted in contemporary, urban North America, rather than medieval or pastoral Europe. I'd already been working with some of these folks (Charles de Lint, Emma Bull, etc.), who were writing novels that would become the foundations for the current Urban Fantasy field. At the time, these kinds of stories were considered so strange and different, it was actually hard to get them into print.

When I was asked by a publishing company to create a shared-world anthology for Young Adult readers, I wanted to create an Urban Fantasy setting that was something like a magical version of New York...but I didn't want it to actually be New York. I want it to be any city and every city -- a place that anyone from anywhere could go to or rela ~ Terri Windling

1980's: not a time period but a state of mind. ~ Carrie Vaughn

Secret ops by secret forces have a nasty tendency to produce unintended, unforeseen, and completely disastrous consequences. New Yorkers will remember well the end result of clandestine U.S. support for Islamic militants against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s: 9/11. ~ Nick Turse

The difficulties of many European countries derive from their corporatism: state projects serving cronies and vast social protection programmes, both run by elites. These surged in the 1970s and 1980s. ~ Edmund Phelps

The workplace revolution that transformed the lives of blue-collar workers in the 1970s and 1980s is finally reaching the offices and cubicles of the white-collar workers. ~ Tom Peters

I have blogged previously about the dangerous and deadly effects of science denialism, from the innocent babies unnecessarily exposed to deadly diseases by other kids whose parents are anti-vaxxers, to the frequent examples of how acceptance of evolution helps us stop diseases and pests (and in the case of Baby Fae, rejection of evolution was fatal), to the long-term effects of climate denial to the future of the planet we all depend upon. But one of the strangest forms of denialism is the weird coalition of people who refuse to accept the medical fact that the HIV virus causes AIDS. What the heck? Didn't we resolve this issue in the 1980s when the AIDS condition first became epidemic and the HIV virus was discovered and linked to AIDS? Yes, we did - but for people who want to deny scientific reality, it doesn't matter how many studies have been done, or how strong the scientific consensus is. There are a significant number of people out there (especially among countries and communities with high rates of AIDS infections) that refuse to accept medical reality. I described all of these at greater length in my new book Reality Check: How Science Deniers Threaten our Future. ~ Donald R. Prothero

In the 1980s a small group of individuals became concerned about the Earth's temperature and what it might do in the future. I hesitate to call them scientists because they have abandoned their scientific principals by which their guess about temperature increases and the cause could achieve scientific acceptance or rejection. ~ Walter Cunningham

The only people who spoke to her were Jimmy Vaughn, who was sweet when he wasn't wasted, though he was wasted all the time ... ~ Sarra Manning

In the Cold War, the West celebrated dissidents such as Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Vaclav Havel, who had the courage to challenge the Soviet system from within. Today, there are many dissidents who challenge Islam – former Muslims, and reformers – but the West either ignores them or dismisses them as "not representative." This is a grave mistake. Reformers must be supported and protected. They should be as well known as Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov, and Havel were in the 1980s – and as well known as Locke and Voltaire were their day, when the West needed freethinkers of its own. ~ Ayaan Hirsi Ali

Back in the 1980s, the 'News of the World' had specialised in digging into the privacy of criminals. In the 1990s, enriched by the excavation of Princess Diana's volatile life, they had widened their work to mine the activities of any celebrity, any public figure. ~ Nick Davies

In the mid-1980s to the early 1990s I was writing songs not because I particularly liked what I was doing, but because I was desperately trying to get back into the charts. I really didn't enjoy it. I didn't like the music I was making, I wasn't proud of it, like I have been before or since. ~ Gary Numan

You don't get rewarded for creating great technology, not anymore," says a friend of mine who has worked in tech since the 1980s, a former investment banker who now advises start-ups. "It's all about the business model. The market pays you to have a company that scales quickly. It's all about getting big fast. Don't be profitable, just get big. ~ Dan Lyons

Don't forget, the superior Betamax technology did not beat out the substandard VHS technology as the standard format for videotape in the 1980s. ~ Simon Sinek

I grew up as a part of the team that helped to field M-1s and M-60-A3s to the army back in 1980s. ~ Eric Shinseki

I became interested in ocean issues in the 1980s when I couldn't take my daughters swimming because of pollution at our local beach. Twenty-five years later, I'm a board member of Oceana, the world's largest international organization dedicated to ocean conservation. ~ Ted Danson

Yet it would be nearly impossible to overstate Lyell's influence. The Principles of Geology went through twelve editions in his lifetime and contained notions that shaped geological thinking far into the twentieth century. Darwin took a first edition with him on the Beagle voyage and wrote afterwards that 'the great merit of the Principles was that it altered the whole tone of one's mind, and therefore that, when seeing a thing never seen by Lyell, one yet saw it partially through his eyes22.' In short, he thought him nearly a god, as did many of his generation. It is a testament to the strength of Lyell's sway that in the 1980s, when geologists had to abandon just a part of his theory to accommodate the impact theory of extinctions, it nearly killed them. But that is another chapter. ~ Bill Bryson

I emerged in that incredible moment in the 1980s when all kinds of social questions about subjectivity and objectivity, about who was making, who was looking. ~ Carrie Mae Weems

If the actors speaking Dothraki or High Valyrian or Castithan or whatever make a mistake, who would know but the creator? Who would care? The truth is probably one in a thousand people will notice, and of those who do, maybe a quarter will care. In the 1980s that amounts to nothing. In the new millennium, though, one quarter of 0.001 percent can constitute a significant minority on Twitter. Or on Tumblr. Or Facebook. Or Reddit. Or ~ David J. Peterson

When I first discovered in the early 1980s the Italian espresso bars in my trip to Italy, the vision was to re-create that for America - a third place that had not existed before. Starbucks re-created that in America in our own image; a place to go other than home or work. We also created an industry that did not exist: specialty coffee. ~ Howard Schultz

The concept of 'peak oil' has penetrated the hearts and minds of people concerned about energy for the future. 'Peak fish' occurred around the end of the 1980s. ~ Sylvia Earle

(When the company was finally broken up in the 1980s to satisfy antitrust regulators, it was worth more than the combined worth of General Electric, General Motors, Ford, IBM, Xerox, and Coca-Cola, and employed a million people.) Bell moved to Washington, D.C., became ~ Bill Bryson

In the mid-1980s, the ratio of debt to personal disposable income for American households was 65 percent. During the next two decades, U.S. household leverage more than doubled, reaching an all-time high of 133 percent in 2007. ~ Katherine Porter

Right-wing influence on sex education has played an equal, if not greater role. Federally mandated abstinence-only programs, which began in the early 1980s, not only reinforced that intercourse was the line in the sand of chastity, but also, using the threat of AIDS as justification, hammered home the idea that it might well kill you. Oral sex, then, was the obvious work-around. I doubt, though, that social conservatives would consider it a victory that, across a range of studies, college students who identify as religious are even more likely than others to say oral sex is not "sex," or that over a third of teenagers included it in their definition of "abstinence" (nearly a quarter included anal sex), or that roughly 70 percent agreed that someone who engages in oral sex is still a virgin. ~ Peggy Orenstein

The only proper suit-and-tie job I've had in my life was the two years in the late 1980s when I ran a small corporate publishing company. I even had a Ford Sierra! ~ Will Self

People tend to overlook the fact that North Korea's economy collapsed at about the same time as South Koreans lost faith in their own state. The late 1980s and early 1990s were a time when South Koreans were questioning the very legitimacy of their republic. ~ Brian Reynolds Myers

My first song was about the smog over Dublin in the 1980s, so yeah, I suppose I was always socially conscious. My first song was not a love song, it was about smog. ~ Damien Dempsey

In a lot of places, of course, the '80s had never really come to an end. ~ Nick Harkaway

In the mid-1980s, operating problems took [nuclear] plants off-line so often that, on an annual basis, they operated at only about 55 percent of their rated total generating capacity. Today, as a result of several decades of experience and an intense focus on performance ... nuclear plants in the United States operate at over 90 percent of capacity. That improvement in operating efficiently is so significant in its impact that it can almost be seen as a new source in electric power itself. ~ Daniel Yergin

Hemingway's minimalism is based on the psychological mechanics of repression. An echo of his approach can be detected in a favorite trope of 1980s minimalists: a pattern of reference to dire secrets and hidden wounds these authors didn't realize they were supposed to have imagined. ~ Madison Smartt Bell

My father was a research doctor at the National Institutes of Health in the early 1980s, and you couldn't work in the field and not know about D. Carleton Gajdusek, who my father often mentioned. ~ Hanya Yanagihara

The next day, I started getting dressed at three for the rehearsal. The beautiful cherry red suit had black stitching, and I had taken the skirt to a seamstress to have it shortened to a sexy upper-midthigh length--an unfortunate habit I'd picked up while watching too much Knots Landing in the late 1980s. I was relatively slender and not the least bit stacked on top, and my bottom was somewhat fit but wildly unremarkable. If I was going to highlight any feature of my anatomy, it would have to be my legs.
When I arrived at the rehearsal at the church, my grandmother kissed me, then looked down and said, "Did you forget the other half of your suit?"
The seamstress had gotten a little overzealous. ~ Ree Drummond

The massive prison-building project that began in the 1980s created the means of concentrating and managing what the capitalist system had implicitly declared to be a human surplus. In the meantime, elected officials and the dominant media justified the new draconian sentencing practices, sending more and more people to prison in the frenzied drive to build more and more prisons by arguing that this was the only way to make our communities safe from murderers, rapists, and robbers. ~ Angela Y. Davis

By the 1980s beauty had come to play in women's status-seeking the same role as money plays in that of men: a defensive proof to aggressive competitors of womanhood or manhood. Since both value systems are reductive, neither reward is ever enough, and each quickly loses any relationship to real-life values. ~ Naomi Wolf

Back in the 1980s when everyone looked a bit off, my friend Tim and his brothers had some publicity shots taken of their band. Eventually they sold the rights to a stock photo agency. Years later, one of the images turned up on a greeting card. The inside said, Greetings from the Dork Club. ~ Mary Roach

Over the past 100 years, there have been three major periods of tax-rate cuts in the U.S.: the Harding-Coolidge cuts of the mid-1920s; the Kennedy cuts of the mid-1960s; and the Reagan cuts of the early 1980s. Each of these periods of tax cuts was remarkably successful as measured by virtually any public policy metric. ~ Arthur Laffer

My mother taught me to knit when I was seven. I forgot about knitting until one day I saw Marion at the counter with hers and confessed that I knew how. Confessed is the right word. In those days, in the early 1980s, knitting was not a hobby a preteen would readily admit to. But Marion, every enthusiastic, pounced upon me and insisted that I show her something I'd made. I did
a misshapen scarf
which she priased exravagantly. she lent me a raspberry-colored wool for another project, a hat for myself. Since then I've been knitting pretty continuously. It's addictive and it's soothing, and fora a few minutes anyway, it makes me feel closer to my mother. ~ Anita Shreve

Footballers today are forced to conform to a bodily aesthetic that in its rigidity and uniformity makes fashion models look as varied as snowflakes. This wasn't always so. Up until the 1980s most teams in all divisions had a couple of fat ones, a couple of little ones, at least one bandy one, one completely covered in hair, two weaklings and a chap with no neck. This was an era when you didn't need names on the backs of shirts in order to tell who's who, you could clearly identify them with your eyes half shut from the other side of the pitch. ~ Danny Baker

To wash down your chicken nuggets with virtually any soft drink in the supermarket is to have some corn with your corn. Since the 1980s virtually all the sodas and most of the fruit drinks
sold in the supermarket have been sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup. ~ Michael Pollan

Julianne Moore and Michael Keaton began in 1980s soap operas and 1970s sitcoms, respectively, such ancient history by show business standards that you need carbon dating to measure their careers. ~ Steve Erickson

General editors' preface The growth of translation studies as a separate discipline is a success story of the 1980s. The subject has developed in many parts of the world and is clearly destined to continue developing well into the twenty-first century. Translation studies brings together work in a wide variety of fields, including linguistics, literary study, history, anthropology, psychology, and economics. This series of books will reflect the breadth of work in translation studies and will enable readers to share in the exciting new developments that are taking place at the present time. ~ Lawrence Venuti

The U.S. - the idea that the U.S. has introduced and imposed principles of international law, that's hardly even a joke. The United States has even gone so far as to veto Security Council resolutions calling on all states to observe international law. That was in the 1980s under Reagan. ~ Noam Chomsky

When it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s. ~ Barack Obama

Mangalore, the coastal Indian town where I lived until I was almost 16, is now a booming city of malls and call-centres. But, in the 1980s, it was a provincial town in a socialist country. ~ Aravind Adiga

I'm a Beatles fan, and I remember in the mid-1980s, when CDs first came out, there was a sound of vinyl and the sound of the needle on it that people loved, and suddenly CDs were threatening. ~ Peter Jackson

Old-growth forests met no needs. They simply were, in a way that bore no questions about purpose or value. They could not be created by men. They could not even be understood by men. They had too many parts that were interconnected in too many ways. Change one part and everything else would change, but in ways that were unpredictable and often inexplicable. This unpredictability removed such forests from the realm of human perspectives and values. The forest did not need to justify or explain itself. It existed outside of instrumental human considerations. ~ Steve Olson