1990s Quotes

Anyway, if you really want to see the Arpanet as the origin of the internet, please explain why the government sat on it for thirty years and did almost nothing with it until it was effectively privatised in the 1990s, with explosive results. ~ Matt Ridley

More may have been learned about the brain and the mind in the 1990s - the so-called decade of the brain - than during the entire previous history of psychology and neuroscience. ~ Antonio Damasio

Unfortunately, every era needs to demonize feminist. The Feminazi was the 1990s version. The term was coined by radio talk-show host Rush Limbaugh to describe women who support abortion rights. It was taken up by ultra-right-wing conservatives everywhere and came to refer feminists in general. (…) A Feminazi is a strident, controlling bitch who –Oh, horrible crime!– insists on equal right for women. She doesn't agree with the right-wing construct that the man is the ruler of the home. Her goal in life is to turn men into whimpering slaves who take care of the kids and share the housecleaning, something men must resist at all costs or American society will crumple even more. The Guerrilla Girls are still waiting for the day when everyone will think of the Feminist as a positive stereotype. Don't let us wait too long. ~ Guerrilla Girls

We have a lot of societal problems that we have to fix in the 1990s. ~ Letitia Baldrige

Early in the 1990s, I flew alone in a dandelion-yellow, single-engine, 180-horsepower Piper Cherokee from Westchester County Airport in New York westward to the Rocky Mountains, landing and refuelling a good many times in middle-sized cities and towns along the way. ~ Cynthia Ozick

A lot of the websites built through the 1990s used Perl. The first webmaster of Sun Microsystems coined a wonderful phrase. He said Perl is the duck tape of the Internet - it's this language that people would write all these scripts that make things just work. ~ Tim O'Reilly

This kind of pragmatism has become a hallmark of our psychological culture. In the mid-1990s, I described how it was commonplace for people to "cycle through" different ideas of the human mind as (to name only a few images) mechanism, spirit, chemistry, and vessel for the soul.14 These days, the cycling through intensifies. We are in much more direct contact with the machine side of mind. People are fitted with a computer chip to help with Parkinson's. They learn to see their minds as program and hardware. They take antidepressants prescribed by their psychotherapists, confident that the biochemical and oedipal self can be treated in one room. They look for signs of emotion in a brain scan. Old jokes about couples needing "chemistry" turn out not to be jokes at all. ~ Sherry Turkle

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

I was introduced to the world of modern food production in the mid-1990s, while researching an article about California's strawberry industry for the 'Atlantic Monthly.' ~ Eric Schlosser

Humanity may destroy the possibilities for life on earth unless the freedom and power that we have acquired are channeled in new creative directions by a spiritual awareness and moral commitment that transcend nationalism, racism, sexism, religious sectarianism, anthropocentrism, and the dualism between human culture and nature. This is the great issue for the 1990s and the twenty-first century. ~ Steven Clark Rockefeller

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

The Mexican debt crisis, Latin American debt crisis, the crises of the 1990s, the Wall Street stock market crash, and other events should have reminded us, and did remind us, that financial instability remains a concern, remains a problem. ~ Ben Bernanke

I wound up becoming an A&R man at London Records in the 1990s, during the boom of Britpop, the last great gold rush of the music industry. I saw incredible greed and terrible behaviour. I was greedy and terribly behaved. ~ John Niven

The opportunities available to actors who achieved the peak of their fame as nameless characters in 1990s softcore horror porn films must be limited. ~ Kristen Roupenian

Back in the early 1970's the average person experienced roughly 500 advertising messages a day. By the 1990's that number had jumped to 5,000 and today (2014) the number of advertising messages we see on a daily basis is close to 13,000. ~ Rob Anspach

We've consistently seen, since the late 1990s, that more than half of women believe that abortion should be severely restricted or abolished altogether. ~ Faye Wattleton

One of the things that sparked my interest in this is the case of Emmanuel Constant, who started a militia called FRAPH that was backed by the CIA. FRAPH killed thousands of Haitians in the early 1990s. Now while Constant is living comfortably in Queens, other Haitians are being deported. I wanted to see how those who have been bruised by people like that deal with coming face to face with their torturers. ~ Edwidge Danticat

Past the sloping green lawn of the park, I entered a new world, regal and historic. Here I walked on swept sidewalks, past pristine buildings and small shops and young mothers or West Indian nannies with children in tow on their way to the playground. Stylish women carried twine-handled shopping bags. The cafes were busy and a church bell praised noon as I ducked underground. ~ Andrew Cotto

The defection of Hussein Kamel was a turning point in the U.N.-imposed disarmament of Iraq in the 1990s. ~ Barton Gellman

My filmmaking style of remixing came out of necessity. When I was a film theory student at UC Berkeley in the early 1990s, there were no film production facilities. The only way I learned to tell stories on film was by re-cutting and splicing together celluloid of old movies, early animated films, home films, sound slug - anything I could get my hands on. ~ Elisa Kreisinger

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem. ~ James Comey

When I was a student there in the mid-1990s, they had just created the weekend; depth and individuality were slowly returning after the austere, colorless low of the 1970s. When I returned to live in China from 2005 to 2013, the country was building everything anew. ~ Evan Osnos

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

When I was building robots in the early 1990s, the problems of voice recognition, image understanding, VOIP, even touchscreen technologies - these were robotics problems. ~ Colin Angle

Smartphone makers sought deeper ties with retail buyers by adding ring tones, games, Web browsers, and other applications to their phones. Carriers, however, wanted this business to themselves. If they couldn't sell applications within their "walled gardens," carriers worried they would be reduced to mere utilities or "dumb pipes" carrying data and voice traffic. Nokia learned the hard way just how ferociously carriers could defend their turf. In the late 1990s the Finnish phone maker launched Club Nokia, a Web-based portal that allowed customers to buy and download ~ Jacquie McNish

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

A half-century later, Mark Twain would say that the gold rush drastically changed the American character, ending the tradition of patient apprenticeships, the gradual mastery of self, talent, and money. Gold created the get-rich-quick mentality that has been with us ever since, most recently during the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s. ~ Pete Hamill

After a major loss of dynamism in the 1960s, productivity growth rates began dropping in most countries, falling by half in the U.S. in the 1970s and more or less ceasing altogether in France, Germany and Britain in the late 1990s. ~ Edmund Phelps

Apple Computer would not have reached its current peak of success if it had feared to roll the dice and launch products that didn't always hit the mark. In the mid-1990s, the company was considered washed up, Steve Jobs had departed, and a string of lackluster product launches unrelated to the company's core business. ~ Naveen Jain

The 1990s felt like the 1990s in a real and good way. ~ Douglas Coupland

Way, way back in the day, like in the 1990s, if you wanted to tell everyone you ate waffles for breakfast, you couldn't just go on the Internet and tweet it out. There was only one way to do it. You had to go outside and scream at the top of your lungs, 'I ate waffles for breakfast!' That's why so many people ended up in institutions. They seemed crazy, but when you think about it, they were just ahead of their time. ~ Ellen DeGeneres

Sonja used to say that Ove was "unforgiving." For instance, he refused to go back to the local bakery eight years after they gave him the wrong change when he bought pastries once at the end of the 1990s. Ove called it "having firm principles." They were never quite in agreement when it came to words and their meanings.
p. 239 ~ Fredrik Backman

In the 1990s, Islamists in Algeria won elections like the Brotherhood did in Egypt. The Algerian military refused to allow the Islamists to take power. A war erupted, killing between 100,000 to 200,000 people, depending on which estimates are to be believed. ~ Richard Engel

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

Learning to cook in the 1990s, I thought 'proper olives' meant black. The benchmark was Kalamata from Greece: purple-black with an almost mushroomy depth of flavour. Other fine examples were tiny Coquilles from Nice and plump round Tanches from Nyons. ~ Bee Wilson

In the 1990's, a time of corporate capital's global ascendancy, the mildest restraints on its prerogatives have been peremptorily rejected. Automatically, under this designation, measures to protect national cultural industries, for example, have been ruled unacceptable infringements of "free trade". ~ Herbert Schiller

I think everybody at IBM knows the early 1990s disaster, and it's in our fabric that you cannot miss the ship. ~ Samuel J. Palmisano

Girls face two major sexual issues in America in the 1990s: One is an old issue of coming to terms with their own sexuality, defining a sexual self, making sexual choices and learning to enjoy sex. The other issue concerns the dangers girls face of being sexually assaulted. By late adolescence, most girls today either have been traumatized or know girls who have. They are fearful of males even as they are trying to develop intimate relations with them. ~ Mary Pipher

For many people in the U.N., the 1990s was the worst decade the organization experienced. This was the decade of Somalia, Srebrenica, of Rwanda and so forth, and yet the reality is, during this period, although there were these awful conflicts, the overall number of wars had gone down. ~ Andrew Mack

Gypsy cabs jostled and honked...Dollar vans lined the sidewalk and people piled in and out. As I walked down the slope, the buildings grew smaller and squalid. Trees vanished...and the heat picked up. Beyond the brick wall of the Navy Yard, the silver skyline of Manhattan glimmered in the distance like a mirage. The industrial remains of the flats were low and decrepit and mostly abandoned, though a few beeping forklifts unloaded trucks here and there. The storefronts were shuttered except for a bank busy with Orthodox Jews. The funk of a chicken processing plant contaminated the air.

I walked along the high brick wall that separated the Navy Yard from the street, frequently stepping over pulverized vials that sparkled like jewels on the sidewalk. There was no shade. I blinked away the dust. ~ Andrew Cotto

When we went in the late 1990s, Nigeria was still in a dictatorship. So we didn't go with a mission. It started really with a sort of blankness and open-endedness. ~ Rem Koolhaas

The heart of the issue is not simply that a group that gets a large portion of its budget from the Walton family fortune is unlikely to be highly critical of Walmart. The 1990s was the key decade when the contours of the climate battle were being drawn - when a collective strategy for rising to the challenge was developed and when the first wave of supposed solutions was presented to the public.

It was also the period when Big Green became most enthusiastically pro-corporate, most committed to a low-friction model of social change in which everything had to be 'win- win.' And in the same period many of the corporate partners of groups like the EDF and the Nature Conservancy - Walmart, FedEx, GM - were pushing hard for the global deregulatory framework that has done so much to send emissions soaring.

This alignment of economic interests - combined with the ever powerful desire to be seen as 'serious' in circles where seriousness is equated with toeing the pro-market line - fundamentally shaped how these green groups conceived of the climate challenge from the start. Global warming was not defined as a crisis being fueled by overconsumption, or by high emissions industrial agriculture, or by car culture, or by a trade system that insists that vast geographical distances do not matter - root causes that would have demanded changes in how we live, work, eat, and shop. Instead, climate change was presented as a narrow technical problem with no end of profita ~ Naomi Klein

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

In Freakonomics, we examined the causes of the rise and fall of violent crime in the United States. In 1960, crime began a sudden climb. By 1980, the homicide rate had doubled, reaching a historic peak. For several years crime stayed perilously high, but in the early 1990s it began to fall and kept falling. So what happened?
In Freakonomics, we identified one missing factor - the legalization of abortion in the early 1970s. The theory was jarring but simple. A rise in abortion meant that fewer unwanted children were being born, which meant fewer children growing up in the sort of difficult circumstances that increase the likelihood of criminality. ~ Steven D. Levitt

As an American man of the 1990s writing about a Japanese woman of the 1930s, I needed to cross three cultural divides - man to woman, American to Japanese, and present to past. ~ Arthur Golden

In a faraway land called 'pre-2000,' what Earthlings now call blogging was called 'keeping a diary.' It's hard work to do well. I tried doing it in the early 1990s but had to stop because I no longer had a life - instead I had this thing that generated anecdotes to go into my diary. The diary took over and I had to stop. ~ Douglas Coupland

Among the early commercial adopters of wild beer were the Cottonwood Brewery of Boone, North Carolina, and Joe's Brewery of Champaign, Illinois. Brewer John Isenhour gained a "cult status" for his production of beers with a lambic profile in the mid-1990s using wild yeast and bacteria that he kept active at various stages of the lambic fermentation cycle. John quite successfully marketed the "Lambic" to his rather conservative clientele in this central Illinois college town as "Belgian lemonade. ~ Jeff Sparrow

In Africa through the 1990s, with notable exceptions in Senegal and Uganda, nearly all the ruling powers denied they had a problem with AIDS. ~ Barton Gellman

Yet the life expectancy for white people without a high school diploma has dropped catastrophically since the 1990s - down by five years for women, three years for men - suggesting a cultural crisis among poor whites akin to that in Russia after the Soviet Union collapsed. Yet the morally preening powerful, confident in their supposedly progressive views, largely ignore this collapse and the people suffering from it. ~ R. R. Reno

In the mid 1990s the Korean film industry was really open-minded. ~ Bong Joon-ho

By the mid-1990s, nearly everything in North Korea was worn out, broken, malfunctioning. The country had seen better days. ~ Barbara Demick

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

Patent lawyers had only lately ascended to the aristocracy of the American bar. Trained not just as lawyers but as scientists or engineers, and working in small, specialized firms, they were at one time rudely dismissed by corporate lawyers as gearheads in green eyeshades, not good enough at science to be scientists, nor sufficiently talented at law to be real lawyers. Then came the intellectual property revolution of the 1990s, and these onetime outcasts found themselves ruling the last vibrant corner of the American economy. ~ Paul Goldstein

It was Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer (the television series, 1997-2003, not the lackluster movie that preceded it) that blazed the trail for Twilight and the slew of other paranormal romance novels that followed, while also shaping the broader urban fantasy field from the late 1990s onward.

Many of you reading this book will be too young to remember when Buffy debuted, so you'll have to trust us when we say that nothing quite like it had existed before. It was thrillingly new to see a young, gutsy, kick-ass female hero, for starters, and one who was no Amazonian Wonder Woman but recognizably ordinary, fussing about her nails, her shoes, and whether she'd make it to her high school prom. Buffy's story contained a heady mix of many genres (fantasy, horror, science-fiction, romance, detective fiction, high school drama), all of it leavened with tongue-in-cheek humor yet underpinned by the serious care with which the Buffy universe had been crafted. Back then, Whedon's dizzying genre hopping was a radical departure from the norm-whereas today, post-Buffy, no one blinks an eye as writers of urban fantasy leap across genre boundaries with abandon, penning tender romances featuring werewolves and demons, hard-boiled detective novels with fairies, and vampires-in-modern-life sagas that can crop up darn near anywhere: on the horror shelves, the SF shelves, the mystery shelves, the romance shelves. ~ Ellen Datlow

Then, suddenly, the work became dangerous, not only for clients but for therapists as well. A well-funded, highly organized opposition appeared, seemingly out of nowhere, in the early 1990s. Its goal was to discredit the existence of ritual abuse, and one of its tactics was to actively undermine any effort to discover what had been done to these clients and anyone who attempted to help them recover. ~ Alison Miller

I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society. ~ William Julius Wilson

I am very proud of our Supreme Court - it is one of the best worldwide. Nevertheless, since the 1990s, we have seen a certain imbalance in the relationship between the judiciary, the parliament and the government. The Supreme Court behaved in an activist way. We have to debate the degree to which such Supreme Court activism is appropriate. ~ Ayelet Shaked

When Sebastian, cearly delighted to be treated like one of the guys, didn't move, Alex bared his teeth. "Depeche-toi!"
Sebastian depeched. Alex turned back, all Cheshire cat smile.
"No," I said.
"No what?"
"No,you are not going to teach me all the cool words so I can go to Chamonix and be conversational."
"Good." He leaned in so I could see the faint dusting of freckles on his nose and smell spearmint gum. "Chamonix is so 1990s. Everyone who is anyone goes to Courchevel these days."
I turned on my heel and started to walk off.
"Jeez. Ella." He loped after me. "What if your problem? Conversational, my ass. Talking to you is like dancing around a fire in paper shoes."
I stopped. "What is that supposed to mean?"
"It's an expression my Ukranian babushka likes. I'll explain it at our first turtoring session."
I scowled at his shirt. This one had what looked like a guy riding a dolphin instead of the ubiquitos alligator or polo player. "There isn't going to be a tutoring session."
"Winslow seems to think otherwise."
"Wouldn't be the first thing she's wrong about," I muttered.
He gave an impressive sigh. The dolphin lurched, but the little guy on it held tight. "You don't want to fail French, do you? That would be a serious admission of weakness from an Italian girl."
I almost smiled. Instead, I announced. "Fuhgeddaboudit. I'll buy a 'Teach Your Poodle French in Ten Easy Lessons' online. Problem solved, and Winslo ~ Melissa Jensen

He hated computers having names like ZX75 and numbers of megabytes. He hated technology as it was in the 1990s. ~ Leander Kahney

(The North Korean army had to lower its height requirement from five feet three in the early 1990s because of the stunting of the younger generation.) ~ Barbara Demick

The human mind has evolved a defense against contamination by biological agents: the emotion of disgust.111 Ordinarily triggered by bodily secretions, animal parts, parasitic insects and worms, and vectors of disease, disgust impels people to eject the polluting substance and anything that looks like it or has been in contact with it. Disgust is easily moralized, defining a continuum in which one pole is identified with spirituality, purity, chastity, and cleansing and the other with animality, defilement, carnality, and contamination. 112 And so we see disgusting agents as not just physically repellent but also morally contemptible. Many metaphors in the English language for a treacherous person use a disease vector as their vehicle - a rat, a louse, a worm, a cockroach. The infamous 1990s term for forced displacement and genocide was ethnic cleansing. ~ Steven Pinker

I feel like the rap metal at the end of the 1990s destroyed rock music for everybody and suddenly everybody felt like they had to apologise for being in rock bands. People suddenly felt bad about wanting to reach massive audiences and the sense of theatre, that we have in our live show, became something to avoid. ~ Nate Ruess

I loved 'Truly Madly Deeply' and all those 1990s romcoms because you had great actresses like Juliet Stevenson and Emma Thompson starting out. ~ Helen George

The fierce battles between New Democrat centrists and old-style liberals that defined the Democratic Party in the 1990s are long gone, with the party unified behind Barack Obama's economic agenda of universal health care, expensive federal programs and more regulation of the financial markets. ~ Nina Easton

The lingering effects of war can inspire callousness even after the guns have fallen silent. Many of us have seen the notorious clip from 60 Minutes in which Madeleine Albright, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and soon to be U.S. Secretary of State, declared that the price of half a million dead children as a result of the sanctions against Iraq during the 1990s had been worth it. ~ Thomas E. Woods Jr.

'Save the Date' feels like a quiet story about two sisters and the men in their lives, kind of reminiscent of the quieter rom-coms of the 1990s; it's very character-driven and not as wedding-focused. ~ Lizzy Caplan

NASA documents from 1966 confirm the United States weather modification programme with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and in the 1990s the US military was publishing papers expounding the war possibilities of weather manipulation, or 'geoengineering' as it is also known. American scientist J. Marvin Herndon described in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health in 2015 how weather modification has been happening for decades and includes the 'make mud, not war' programme named Project Popeye to create monsoon-scale rain during the Vietnam War. US Air Force document AF 2025 Final Report published in 1996 explained how artificially-generated floods, hurricanes, droughts and earthquakes 'offers the war fighter a wide range of possible options to defeat or coerce an adversary'. ~ David Icke

If Darwinists are opposed to mentioning scientific problems with their view, you would think they would be even more opposed to mentioning intelligent design. Yet Darwinists have been discussing ID in public school science classes for years ... Biology textbooks have been mentioning intelligent design since the late 1990s - but only to misrepresent and disparage it. ~ Jonathan Wells

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

When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out. ~ Tom Rachman

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

While I was deep in my fantasy, in yet another episode of perfect timing, Marlboro Man called from the road.
"Hey," he said, the mid-1990s spotty cell phone service only emphasizing the raspy charm of his voice.
"Oh! Just the person I want to talk to," I said, grabbing paper and a pen. "I have a question for you--"
"I bought your wedding present today," Marlboro Man interrupted.
"Huh?" I said, caught off guard. "Wedding present?" For someone steeped in the proper way of doing things, I was ashamed that a wedding gift for Marlboro Man had never crossed my mind.
"Yep," he said. "And you need to hurry up and marry me so I can give it to you."
I giggled. "So…what is it?" I asked. I couldn't even imagine. I hoped it wasn't a tennis bracelet.
"You have to marry me to find out," he answered.
Yikes. What was it? Wasn't the wedding ring itself supposed to be the present? That's what I'd been banking on. What would I ever get him? Cuff links? An Italian leather briefcase? A Montblanc pen? What do you give a man who rides a horse to work every day?
"So, woman," Marlboro Man said, changing the subject, "what did you want to ask me?"
"Oh!" I said, focusing my thoughts back to the reception. "Okay, I need you to name your absolute favorite foods in the entire world."
He paused. "Why?"
"I'm just taking a survey," I answered.
"Hmmm…" He thought for a minute. "Probably steak."
Duh. "Well, besides steak," I said.
"Steak ~ Ree Drummond

I am also sorry that I helped to start the anti-GM movement back in the mid 1990s, and that I thereby assisted in demonizing an important technological option which can be used to benefit the environment. ~ Mark Lynas

Thomas Friedman, in his best-selling book The Lexus and the Olive Tree, declared that what happened in Asia wasn't a crisis at all. "I believe globalization did us all a favor by melting down the economies of Thailand, Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Mexico, Russia, and Brazil in the 1990s, because it laid bare a lot of rotten practices and institutions, ~ Naomi Klein

The Taliban outlawed wearing polish in the late 1990s, punishing some offenders by amputating a fingertip. Importing polish was banned only in July 2001, which suggests that women were still wearing painted nails within the safety of their homes. ~ Virginia Postrel

As a graduate student at Oxford in 1963, I began writing about books in revolutionary France, helping to found the discipline of book history. I was in my academic corner writing about Enlightenment ideals when the Internet exploded the world of academic communication in the 1990s. ~ Robert Darnton

In America, we have 19th century school conditions and a curriculum that prepares our kids for the 1990s. ~ Heidi Hayes Jacobs

NAFTA, supported by the Secretary cost, us 800,000 jobs nationwide, tens of thousands of jobs in the Midwest. Permanent normal trade relations with China cost us millions of jobs. Look, I was on a picket line in early 1990's against NFATA because you didn't need a PhD in economics to understand that American workers should not be forced to compete against people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour. ~ Bernie Sanders

Since the early 1990s, a shadow government has taken root along K Street, the Washington corridor that is home to block after stately block of law firms and lobbying offices. Over the years, this army of influence peddlers has gone well beyond the hunt for votes on Capitol Hill. Smart lobbyists know that it is not just the final vote on a bill that counts, but every step along the way. Business enjoys huge political advantages by having its lobbying agents meet day in and day out with key legislators and their staffs, either to kill bills or provisions in them that business considers hostile or to insert arcane subparagraphs that its lobbyists have drafted and tailored to specific corporate interests. ~ Hedrick Smith

The main cause of Europe's deep fall - the losses of inclusion, job satisfaction and wage growth - is the devastating slowdown of productivity that began in the late 1990s and struck large swaths of the continent. It holds down the growth of wages rates, and it depresses employment. ~ Edmund Phelps

Now, I do think when we move into 2012 and '13 when, presumably, the economy is on firmer ground, I would allow the tax rates for upper-income individuals to revert back to where they were before the cuts in the 1990s. I think at that point it makes perfect sense. ~ Mark Zandi

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

Back in L.A., I'd remained friends with my freshman-year boyfriend, Collin, and we'd become even closer after he confided in me one dark and emotional night that he'd finally come to terms with his homosexuality. Around that time, his mother was visiting from Dallas, and Collin invited me to meet them at Hotel Bel Air for brunch. I wore the quintessential early-1990s brunch outfit: a copper-brown silk tank with white, dime-size polka dots and a below-the-knee, swinging skirt to match. A flawless Pretty Woman--Julia Roberts polo match replica. I loved that outfit.
It was silk, though, and clingy, and the second I sat down at the table I knew I was in trouble. My armpits began to feel cool and wet, and slowly I noticed the fabric around my arms getting damper and damper. By the time our mimosas arrived, the ring of sweat had spread to the level of my third rib; by mealtime, it had reached the waistline of my skirt, and the more I tried to will it away, the worse it got. I wound up eating my Eggs Florentine with my elbows stuck to my hip bones so Collin and his mother wouldn't see. But copper-brown silk, when wet, is the most unforgiving fabric on the planet. Collin had recently come out to his parents, so I'd later determined I'd experienced some kind of sympathetic nervousness on Collin's behalf. I never wore that outfit again. Never got the stains out.
Nor would I ever wear this suit again. ~ Ree Drummond

I left Britain in the mid-1990s when TV was going down the cundy - another good Dundee word - because I wanted a film career. But as I get older, I find myself being drawn back to my roots, and I'm loving it. ~ Charlie Cox

Since the break-up of the 1990s, Russia has not had winter sports facilities. All the winter sport venues were effectively located in countries that are no longer part of the federation. There is a strong argument for saying Sochi's legacy will be this country will have winter sports facilities it did not have before. ~ Sebastian Coe

When husbands work fifty or more hours per week, wives with children are 44 percent more likely to quit their jobs than wives with children whose husbands work less.11 Many of these mothers are those with the highest levels of education. A 2007 survey of Harvard Business School alumni found that while men's rates of full-time employment never fell below 91 percent, only 81 percent of women who graduated in the early 2000s and 49 percent of women who graduated in the early 1990s were working full-time.12 ~ Sheryl Sandberg

I have a CS degree and a history that includes working as a software developer and being a computer magazine columnist back during the 1990s. I guess I simply paid attention to the social effects of the IT revolution as I lived through it. ~ Charles Stross

[John H.] Sununu promised Republicans that the relatively obscure [David H.] Souter would be a 'home run for conservatives,' but this prediction could not have been more wrong. Souter ended up being one of the liberal members of the Court during the late 1990s and the 2000s, which prompted a 'no more Souters' mantra among conservatives. ~ Joan Biskupic

Politically Incorrect was the name of the show Bill Maher hosted in the 1990s. It's also an apt description of the man himself. Now host of
HBO's hit show Real Time, I find Maher to be one of the sharpest observers of American politics and life in general out there. It doesn't mean I always agree with him. I always find him funny, though. ~ Fareed Zakaria

In market research I did at Microsoft Corp. in the early 1990s, I estimated that the 'Wall Street Journal' took in about 75 cents per copy from subscribers, $1.25 at the newsstand and a whopping $5 per copy from ads. The ad revenue let them run a far bigger newsroom than subscribers were paying for. ~ Nathan Myhrvold

Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for 'If the United States fights somebody, we're going to be huge. They're going to be small.' ~ Thomas P.M. Barnett

Indie music is 'it' now. It's kind of a revolution to the music: 1980s, 1990s music was getting very sanitized; they were complying with the music industry. Music was getting more and more dead in a way. Now, because of the social climate that's very severe, the artists are compelled to start being real. It's really great that indie music is now. ~ Yoko Ono

In the mid-1990s, when I stopped having to run from the shows to the film developing lab and first saw digital images, I blessed technology and was convinced that my working life was changing for the better. ~ Suzy Menkes

I started performing as a stand-up comedian on my own in the mid-1990s. ~ Mark Billingham

Today, the Power Elite is more geographically concentrated in specific areas. Economist Jamie Galbraith found that if you measured inequality across counties in the United States in the 1990s, half the rise occurred in 5 counties out of 3,150: New York, New York; King County, Washington; and San Francisco, Santa Clara, and San Mateo in Northern California.24 ~ Christopher L. Hayes

Suppose the elections are free and fair and those elected are racists, fascists, separatists", said the American diplomat Richard Holbrooke about Yugoslavia in 1990s. "that is the dilemma ~ Fareed Zakaria

In this way, the Church was a true reflection of the whole of Russian society. The KGB and the Russian people had penetrated each other to such an extent that they could not be separated. The culture of betrayal and suspicion and distrust that the KGB relied on had become part of the national culture, poisoning politics in the 1990s and beyond: decades of corruption, murder and sordid sex scandals. If it cannot purge itself, however, the Russian nation will never rid itself of the illness that has driven people to alcohol. Russians need to trust each other again. ~ Oliver Bullough

In the 1990s the world's population for the first time exceeded six billion, more than three times what it had been when the First World War broke out. ~ Niall Ferguson