80s And 90s Quotes

I was not even allowed to mention the name Madonna in my household - just because I think the '80s and '90s were so Madonna-filled. She was going through so many evolutions at that time. ~ Katy Perry

The trumpet player, Ronnie Hughes, has still got his chops today but for some strange reason the culture doesn't call him because he's 83-years-old. And these people are in their 70s and 80s and 90s and came with such verve every day and would still be shooting these 10 and 12 hour days. So, that in itself made this an extraordinarily special occasion for all of us. It wasn't a job for the crew after a few days, it took on another tone. ~ Dustin Hoffman

Back in the '80s and '90s, when GM was consistently posting giant profits, they were simultaneously firing tens of thousands of workers in my hometown of Flint and across Michigan. ~ Michael Moore

I look up to a lot of old school drummers from the '70s, '80s, and '90s. ~ Ashton Irwin

We lost our minds in the '80s and '90s; we really as a society just felt that everyone could only care about themselves. There was no responsibility to discuss what's going on in your town, your state, your nation. And it was a blast, it was really fun, but it doesn't work. ~ Adam McKay

I'm hoping that these series, that originally aired in the 80's and 90's, prove to be as entertaining online and on portable devices as they were when first broadcast on network television. ~ Stephen J. Cannell

I really love rap music. I grew up in the '80s and '90s with Public Enemy, N.W.A., LL Cool J - I'm a hip-hop encyclopedia. But I got kind of frustrated with the chauvinistic side of rap music, the one that makes it hard to write songs about love and relationships. ~ Mayer Hawthorne

Back in the '80s and '90s, you could hit the quarterback low, you could hit the quarterback high. You could hit him pretty much late. ~ Vinny Testaverde

I grew up idolizing these men, like Arnold Schwarzenegger. I loved Sly (Stallone). I loved Bruce Willis. These guys embodied everything that action was in the 80s and 90s. ~ Katee Sackhoff

When punk and new wave styles exploded in the late '70s, some established artists were nimble enough to respond to the changes around them. Some grumbled, "What am I supposed to do, forget how to play?", and continued to ride their dinosaurs into extinction, but others willingly adapted to the streamlining and back-to-basics urges of the times, without giving up all they had learned. Former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel, for example, or former Yes keyboardist Trevor Horn, continued to produce vital, influential music through the '80s and '90s. Ian Anderson has continued to lead Jethro Tull out of the '60s and '70s and quietly through the decades, making high quality music and finding a large enough audience to continue recording and touring worldwide. ~ Neil Peart

Have you ever wondered where the idea of retirement at the age of 65 came from? I'll tell you where: Otto von Bismarck, the president of Prussia, in 1889. Actually, Bismarck's government: At the time, the life expectancy of the average Prussian was about 45. Today, so many are living well into their 80s and 90s that the same promise might well bankrupt the federal government within the next generation. ~ Robert T. Kiyosaki

Nineties hip-hop was a big influence for me; it still is. I love '90s everything. And it's when I was born, too. I'm a '90s kid for sure. ~ Tori Kelly

I lived in London for a time in the '90s and I love it here. You know, I just go and see shows and have great dinners and walk around. ~ Elizabeth Peyton

There are hundreds of Frank Lloyd Wright buildings around the United States and in other countries, too. Wright lived into his 90s, and one of his most famous buildings, the Guggenheim Museum in New York, was completed just before his death. Wright buildings look like Wright buildings - that is their paradox. ~ Jane Smiley

I always had a sense that I would fall in love with Tokyo. In retrospect I guess it's not that surprising. I was of the generation that had grown up in the '80s when Japan was ascendant (born aloft by a bubble whose burst crippled its economy for decades), and I'd fed on a steady diet of anime and samurai films. ~ Junot Diaz

Fitness trainers will tell you that arm lifts with light weights can prevent wiggle waggle. But if that were true, would Jane Fonda have it? This is hard-body Jane, the woman who, back in the '80s, produced the best-selling workout videos. When she was 72, she made two more, though they included things like exercises for arthritic hands (and wore a leotard that covered her arms). ~ Anonymous

Growing up in the 70s and 80s, it took effort to be a nerd. You had to seek out the nerd stuff. ~ Chris Hardwick

Discovering L.A., in particular in the early '80s, was pretty spectacular; it was fun and carefree, and there was not nearly as much traffic as exists today. It was very much the last gasps of the Beach Boys' ideal view of L.A.: sun, the beach, cars, blondes, etc. ~ Zach Galligan

I guess personally I really like "Take on Me" by Aha. I think it just defines the 80s and how insane it was and like neon and like calculator watches and that whole thing. ~ Evan Peters

If for no other reason than it's just fun to watch people age, and it's fun to watch what happened to '80s hairdos and outfits, and what they look like now. ~ Alex Borstein

When I came to the CIA in the mid-'90s, our graduating class of case officers was unbelievably low. Now, after years of rebuilding, our training programs and putting our best efforts to recruit the most talented men and women, we are graduating more clandestine officers than at any time in the history of the Central Intelligence Agency. ~ George Tenet

The 80s were deranged. People had all these liberties all of a sudden and all the freedom in the world, the Less Than Zero sort of themes that came from that period, I think electronic music works very well for that whole idiom. ~ Sam De Jong

I think I heard it [ Ferris Bueller's Day Off ] earlier. This was being played on a station in San Francisco called Live 105, which was a new wave station. It was one of the first stations to change its format in the early '80s. There was this wave of really strange music coming from Europe like Kraftwork and Freur. ~ Margaret Cho

In the early '90s, I was hired to write educational dramas about HIV and AIDS in the shantytowns. I did that for two and a half years, and then I was hired on other films. When 'Tsotsi' presented itself, I thought, 'This is not a world I grew up in, but I've spent a great deal of time writing about it and researching it in my past.' ~ Gavin Hood

I don't dislike rappers or hip-hop or people who like it. I went to the Def Jam tour in Manchester in the '80s when rap was inspirational. Public Enemy were awesome. But it's all about status and bling now, and it doesn't say anything to me. ~ Noel Gallagher

What happened in the 80's was that all the men died of AIDS. That was a particularly depressing time because so many people passed away and it was a very desperate and lonely time, so I think a lot of people felt that we were somehow, unreceived. Not only by the disease but also by the public image of the disease. It really gave homophobia a real shot in the arm and changed the way people viewed gays, queers. It became an entirely different atmosphere. ~ Margaret Cho

I cursed and rubbed my forehead. The radio sang its bigotry in perfect '80s pop harmony. Let's send 'em aaallllllll ba-ack to Aaaaafrica . . . I reached down to the knob, to find the radio was already off. Here we fucking go. ~ David Wong

The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. ~ Joe Bastardi

I don't look back with any bitterness, though there are a couple of judgment calls and some '80s hairdos that I'd like to do over. ~ Rob Lowe

There's a psychologist called Mary & Diamond who at Brooklyn in California, in the 80s studied rats. And they took rats at different ages. Newborns, some of whom they deliberately brain damaged, adult, middle-aged, elderly rats. And they exposed these rats to different levels of environmental stimulation, better food, more playmates, toys to play with and so on.

They found out a couple of months later that the rats, at any age, including the brain-damaged rats, who had the better stimulation, they were smarter. But in the autopsy then they also found that in the front part of their brain they had larger nerve-cells with more connections with other nerve-cells and richer blood supply. In other words that environmental stimulation actually caused a change in the state of the brain, even in the older rats.

And that's called neuroplasticity. The capacity of the brain to develop new circuits. So whether it comes to ADHD, addiction, depression or other childhood disorders or any other issue with adults as well, if we recognize them not as ingrained, genetically-determined diseases, but as problems of development, then the question becomes very different. Then the question becomes not just "how do we treat the symptoms?" (and addiction itself is a symptom, depression is a symptom), but "how do we help people develop out of these conditions?"

In other words, it is not a medical question, purely, but a developmental question. And development always ~ Gabor Mate

When it came to hip-hop ... I don't know. Maybe I was insecure. You know, this is the early '90s. If you were a white guy, and you were rapping, that wasn't as accepted yet. I was scared of the quiet Northeast suburbs, so I couldn't embrace my full rapper self. ~ Charlie Day

Before the 90s, black metal wasn't a selling tool [and didn't] have money behind it. Then it became a pop sensation. Now that the record industry has collapsed and started to rot, things are livening up a bit again. ~ Mat McNerney

The now-famous yearly Candlebrow Conferences, like the institution itself, were subsidized out of the vast fortune of Mr. Gideon Candlebrow of Grossdale, Illinois, who had made his bundle back during the great Lard Scandal of the '80s, in which, before Congress put an end to the practice, countless adulterated tons of that comestible were exported to Great Britain, compromising further an already debased national cuisine, giving rise throughout the island, for example, to a Christmas-pudding controversy over which to this day families remain divided, often violently so. In the consequent scramble to develop more legal sources of profit, one of Mr. Candlebrow's laboratory hands happened to invent "Smegmo," an artificial substitute for everything in the edible-fat category, including margarine, which many felt wasn't that real to begin with. An eminent Rabbi of world hog capital Cincinnati, Ohio, was moved to declare the product kosher, adding that "the Hebrew people have been waiting four thousand years for this. Smegmo is the Messiah of kitchen fats." [...]

Miles, locating the patriotically colored Smegmo crock among the salt, pepper, ketchup, mustard, steak sauce, sugar and molasses, opened and sniffed quizzically at the contents. "Say, what is this stuff?"

"Goes with everything!" advised a student at a nearby table. "Stir it in your soup, spread it on your bread, mash it into your turnips! My doormates comb their hair with it! There's a million uses fo ~ Thomas Pynchon

I was never a big fashion person, and so I'm sure I wore whatever. I was growing, and so I just wore whatever clothes that weren't that expensive and made sense at the time. But I'm sure that I look back and say, 'What was I thinking?' My adolescence was more in the '80s, and that's more my cross to bear. ~ Vince Vaughn

My cousin Helen, who is in her 90s now, was in the Warsaw ghetto during World War II. She and a bunch of the girls in the ghetto had to do sewing each day. And if you were found with a book, it was an automatic death penalty. She had gotten hold of a copy of 'Gone With the Wind', and she would take three or four hours out of her sleeping time each night to read. And then, during the hour or so when they were sewing the next day, she would tell them all the story. These girls were risking certain death for a story. And when she told me that story herself, it actually made what I do feel more important. Because giving people stories is not a luxury. It's actually one of the things that you live and die for. ~ Neil Gaiman

The ethics of editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and '80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry. ~ Roger Mudd

My biggest style inspirations come from the '90s. I'm really inspired by TLC, Janet Jackson, and designers like Jeremy Scott. I'm hugely inspired by Club Kids from New York back in the '90s. I'm inspired by the drag queen scene. Combat boots and the torn off jeans and a baggy shirt - I love that look. ~ Kat Graham

In the '90s, there was scant presidential leadership and insufficient domestic political mobilization for foreign policy grounded in human rights. ~ Samantha Power

Movements in literature were not caricatures - in the sense that they actually functioned as an ideology in politics does. As now a monopolistic ideology in politics prevails in the literature as well a single movement prevails: that of networking as a literary quality. Quality = networking is the magic formula: take a Krijn Peter Hesselink, never managed to score a positive review but reviews are old news: it is only referential authority trickling down from that network pyramid that counts. Thus, nowadays its perfectly possible to be on top of the Pyramid without ever getting a positive review, or - even worse - I even see people rising in literary ranks that have never written any books at all. Ergo, your point that another ideology would make a 'caricature' of literary history is exactly the same reasoning used by neoliberals to deconstruct any political change: another ideology? Impossible, because they no longer exist, only we still exist.

In this way you get a pyramid shape you also see in popular music. It's still the bands from the 70's and 80's who earn the big money. New talent can't really play ball anymore. This of course embedded in a sauce of eternal talent shows, because the incumbent males have to just keep pretending they are everyone's benefactors. In the literature its the same: it is still Pfeijffer that gets the large sums of money from the Foundation of Literature, and it's still Samuel Vriezen pretending that that doesn't matter.

Martijn Benders

Writing my own novels in the '90s ... I never imagined that in ten years, science and rationality would require explanation and defense in a world rocked and ruled by religious fervor. ~ Mary Doria Russell

Excellence is THE trend of the '80s. Walk into any shopping mall bookstore, go to the rack where they keep the best-sellers such as Garfield Gets Spayed, and you'll see a half-dozen books telling you how to be excellent: In Search of Excellence, Finding Excellence, Grasping Hold of Excellence, Where to Hide Your Excellence at Night So the Cleaning Personnel Don't Steal It, etc. ~ Dave Barry

I've known Larry Clark since I was fourteen. I've always skateboarded in Manhattan. Larry got into the scene in the early '90s, taking pictures and skating with us. ~ Leo Fitzpatrick

It was in the '80s, so I guess big hair and high bangs. And I had so many gummy bracelets! While we were doing 'Full House,' we were like, 'You know, in 10 years, we're going to look back on this and think this is horrible.' But everyone looked like that! ~ Candace Cameron Bure

Anyway, in the mid 80's I was spending a fortune buying old Golden Age books from the late 30's and 40's and I was making personal appearances at a lot of sci fi and comic book conventions all around the country here so that I could find books for my collection. ~ Bill Mumy

I realized I couldn't have one foot in the fiction world and one foot in the nonfiction world, which is why 'Here I Go Again' is so not me. I didn't graduate from high school in the '90s, I never listened to metal music, and I don't time travel. ~ Jen Lancaster

As an old-time New Yorker, it's not that I miss the '70s and '80s or whatever. I miss the fact that there was a certain kind of energy that exists when people can live for nothing. ~ Abel Ferrara

When I first started working at MIT, back in the '80s, our writing department had a joint cocktail party with the Harvard writing department. It was kind of oil-and-water. ~ Joe Haldeman

I grew up in New York City in the '80s, and it was the epicenter of hip-hop. There was no Internet. Cable television wasn't as broad. I would listen to the radio, hear cars pass by playing a song, or tape songs off of the radio. At that time, there was such an excitement around hip-hop music. ~ Michael Rapaport

One of my favorite things about working on 'Glory Daze' is getting to wear amazing '80s outfits coupled with fabulously over-the-top hair and makeup. My wardrobe usually consists of colorful sweaters, denim skirts, high-waisted shorts, crop tops, dangly earrings, jean jackets, and, of course, panty hose and shoulder pads. ~ Julianna Guill

I grew up with rock and pop music from the 70s and 80s. I had to play guitar in school - it was a music college and we had to take instrument classes there - so I think guitar playing and guitar sounds have always been an influence. ~ Christian Fennesz

My childhood was pretty colorful; I like to use the word turbulent. But it was a great time to grow up, the '70s and '80s in Brooklyn, East Flatbush. It was culturally diverse: You had Italian culture, American culture, the Caribbean West Indian culture, the Hasidic Jewish culture. Everything was kind of like right there in your face. A lot of violence, you know, especially toward the '80s the neighborhood got really violent, but it made me who I am, it made me strong. ~ Michael K. Williams

I like it better that people aren't throwing stuff at my face and trying to fight me on stage. Like in the '80s, it was just aggravating all the time. I have scars from cigars and cigarettes on me, Bic pens, burns from cigarette lighters, all that. ~ Henry Rollins

The moment artists can just do what they love to do then music will go right back to where it used to be. I mean back in the '60s and '70s and '80s, that's what it was. ~ Akon

The only difference between the Bel Air of the '90s and the Bel Air of my childhood is that now the nannies are Latina instead of British, and the cars European instead of American. ~ Lorna Luft