Quotessence
Home / Topics / 80s Quotes

80s Quotes

Browse 517 quotes about 80s.

Related topics

ThinkingPeopleLateIfsKindStillsWayKnowsBandBigsYearsGrewGrew UpLooksMadeStuffFirstsShowsFeelsKidsWantWorldFilmRocksUsedRememberPopsWells80s And 90sArtistGrowing UpSongWantedGrowingLittlesMeanMenTelevisionWarYoungAgeBornComedyCultureFansFashionHairRecordsWritingGenerationsGuyHipsNew YorkRealSometimesWholeCareersHardHas BeensHip HopHopsLongPeriodsSawsTodayActorsCollegeDifferentErasGirlI CanMusic IsSchoolTryingVideoArtBlackBookCharacterClubsDoeDoneGroupsHeardHugeImportantInterestingLastsMiddleMomentsNightPlaySaidStarsStyleAbleActionAlbumsAmericaChildrenmore

80s Quotes

“The Government set the stage economically by informing everyone that we were in a depression period, with very pointed allusions to the 1930s. The period just prior to our last 'good' war. ... Boiled down, our objective was to make killing and military life seem like adventurous fun, so for our inspiration we went back to the Thirties as well. It was pure serendipity. Inside one of the Scripter offices there was an old copy of Doc Smith's first LENSMAN space opera. It turned out that audiences in the 1970s were more receptive to the sort of things they scoffed at as juvenilia in the 1930s. Our drugs conditioned them to repeat viewings, simultaneously serving the ends of profit and positive reinforcement. The movie we came up with stroked all the correct psychological triggers. The fact that it grossed more money than any film in history at the time proved how on target our approach was.' 'Oh my God... said Jonathan, his mouth stalling the open position. 'Six months afterward we ripped ourselves off and got secondary reinforcement onto television. We pulled a 40 share. The year after that we phased in the video games, experimenting with non-narcotic hypnosis, using electrical pulses, body capacitance, and keying the pleasure centers of the brain with low voltage shocks. Jesus, Jonathan, can you *see* what we've accomplished? In something under half a decade we've programmed an entire generation of warm bodies to go to war for us and love it. They buy what we tell them to buy. Music, movies, whole lifestyles. And they hate who we tell them to. ... It's simple to make our audiences slaver for blood; that past hasn't changed since the days of the Colosseum. We've conditioned a whole population to live on the rim of Apocalypse and love it. They want to kill the enemy, tear his heart out, go to war so their gas bills will go down! They're all primed for just that sort of denouemment, ti satisfy their need for linear storytelling in the fictions that have become their lives! The system perpetuates itself. Our own guinea pigs pay us money to keep the mechanisms grinding away. If you don't believe that, just check out last year's big hit movies... then try to tell me the target demographic audience isn't waiting for marching orders. ("Incident On A Rainy Night In Beverly Hills")”

WarPoliticsHollywoodEntertainmentCinemaConspiracy80sStar WarsMoviesVideo Games1980sBlockbusters
Book:Seeing Red
Create image

“Girls don't fight." The king and his men laughed heartily; Ash glittered with anger, her eyes bright as ice in the moonbeams. "You speak an outrage," she said to Daisy. "What world is it where females don't fight! It must be a world devised by males, where they can triumph unopposed." "-and foully dull it must be," finished the king. "Who wants an unarmed victory?”

FeminismForgottenObscure80sFeminist QuotesEighties
Book:The Oak King and the Ash Queen
Create image

“If the festivities at Christmas and the New Year take the form of an in creasingly conventional hullabaloo - since we no longer have the winter solstice as our excuse in the electronic age, nor, in the age of Jesus Christ Superstar, that of the Nativity, nor even that of the snow and ice isolating each person in their own inner space and numbing the blood in the veins - if the end-of-year revels make people so anxious, it is because they are taking the measure of the twelve months that are to come, which they will slowly have to plough through one by one. It is the same with time today as it is with having a child: it is too long in the carrying, too long agrowing. We would like to have the chance to enjoy it right away, to have the fast-forwarded projection of the next century. Think how impatient we are for the year 2000, this whole millennium to get through, while we are already madly curious about the year 2020 and, no doubt, perfectly disenchanted as to what awaits us in '86. The celebrations of the millennium really are going to have to be brilliant to overcome the boredom we feel when we think of the next century. If only we could at least know that there were merely one or two hundred years to go, that would make things more interesting. There is nothing like a catastrophe to usher in a millennium. They regenerate time in the same way as a cloudburst regenerates low water reserves. Yet it is time, real time, we are going to be short of. If the year 2000 does not happen, it will be because time will simply have disappeared, as winter has in some latitudes. But this is a dream. I fear that we won't have sufficient reserves to get to this point, and that the year 2000 will disappoint us as the year 1000 did by not bringing with it the end of the world.”

80s2020InsustainabilityFestivityEnd Of Year
Book:Cool memories
Create image

“Michael [Hutchence] is hands down one of the greatest frontmen in music. The style, the voice—all of it. Any way that I was ever influenced by him really comes down to small, pale imitations compared to the real thing. There is a fearlessness about him. Watching him at Wembley Stadium with 70,000 people, he looks as comfortable as if he were in his own living room.”

MusicNostalgia80sMad World80s Music80s NostalgiaNew WaveRob ThomasJonathan BernsteinLori MajewskiMatchbox 20
Book:Mad World: An Oral History of New Wave Artists and Songs That Defined the 1980s
Create image

“En los ochenta, aún se escuchaban guitarras en las discotecas e incluso cuando sonaban esos niñatos de Hombres G, por más que arrugáramos la nariz con mohín despectivo, no podíamos dejar de corear que quiero comprarme un jersey a rayas. Entonces ()La música aún podía salvarnos. Fue justo antes de que se pusiera en marcha la trituradora de emociones, la mákina, la electrónica, el house, el trance, los miles de nombres para aludir a la victoria del frío.”

80sMusica
Author:Barbara Blasco
Create image

“Not long after that, the questions came: Why you? Drag had been around forever. Why had I been able to crack the code after so many false starts and almosts? But I knew they would never understand the delicate choreography I’d done to make it all work. I’d mastered the art of naughty-lite: two spoonfuls of Diana Ross, a pinch of Cher, a shake of Dolly Parton, all sealed with Walt Disney’s family-friendliness. Before, I had been blurry—confusing, a thing that only some people could understand. Finally, I had snapped into focus, just in time for the whole world to see. The eighties, with all its excess and opulence, had also been marred by darkness: the heaviness of crack cocaine, the AIDS epidemic, the crashes of S&Ls in the markets. There was a yearning for levity in the culture, the very same irreverence and sense of play that had animated me my whole life. A window opened. I stepped through it.”

ComedyDrag80s80s Music
Book:The House of Hidden Meanings
Create image

“The Lottery by Stewart Stafford It was New York, 1984, The AIDS tsunami roared in, Friends, old overnight, no more, Breathless, I went for a check-up. A freezing winter's dawn, A solitary figure before me, What we called a drag queen, White heels trembled in the cold. "Hi, are you here to get tested?" Gum chewed, brown eyes stared. This was not my type of person, I turned heel and walked away. At month's end, a crippling flu, The grey testing centre called, Two hundred people ahead of me; A waking nightmare all too real. I gave up and turned to leave, But a familiar voice called out: "Hey, you there, come back!" I stopped and turned around. The drag queen stood there in furs, But sicker, I didn't recognise them, "Stand with me in the line, honey." "Nah, I'm fine, I'll come back again." "Support an old broad before she faints?" A voice no longer frail but pin-sharp. I got in line to impatient murmurs: "If anyone has a problem, see me!" Sylvester on boombox, graveyard choir. My pal's stage name was Carol DaRaunch, (After the Ted Bundy female survivor) Their real name was Ernesto Rodriguez. After seeing the doctor, Carol hugged me, Writing down their number on some paper, With their alias not their real name on it: "Is this the number of where you work?" "THAT is my home number to call me on. THAT'S my autograph, for when I'm famous!" "I was wrong about you, Carol," I said. "Baby, it takes time to get to know me!" A hug, shimmy, the threadbare blonde left. A silent chorus of shuffling dead men walking, Spartan results, a young man's death sentence. Real words faded rehearsal, my eyes watered. Two weeks on, I cautiously phoned up Carol. The receiver was picked up, dragging sounds, Like furniture being moved: "Is Carol there?" "That person is dead." They hung up on me. All my life's harsh judgements, dumped on Carol, Who was I to win life's lottery over a guardian angel? I still keep that old phone number forty years on, Crumpled, faded, portable guilt lives on in my wallet. © Stewart Stafford, 2024. All rights reserved.”

FearFriendshipGriefEmpathyMemoryAidsLgbtq80sStigmaAids Epidemic
Author:Stewart Stafford
Create image

“Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude-that moment being the tail end of the go-go '80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.”

WorldIdeasWarEndsMomentsProblemActionSciencePoliticalHumanitySocialNatureNaturalConsciousnessConditionsCapitalismCrisisClimateClimate ChangeSpreadLikesAround The WorldAccomplishedCollectivesMidstThat MomentSpheresMainstreamTailsHostile80sLapIdeologicalMagnitudeCrusadesSocial ConditionsCollective Action
Author:Naomi Klein
Create image

“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.”

BookNightWalksHalfFindingsHumorousExcellenceStealingExcellentEtcTrendsShoppingDozenCleaning80sBookstoresMallsGraspingSellersRacksPersonnelBest SellersGarfield
Author:Dave Barry
Create image

“I've had production offers with artists I really admire, and oftentimes that doesn't work out. Sometimes it does, but... For instance I was asked if I wanted to do a Talking Heads album back in the late '70s, early '80s, and I was already working on a different project and didn't have time, so I never got the opportunity to work with them.”

IfsDoeDifferentSometimesWantedArtistOpportunityTalkingOffersProjectsLateAlbumsProductionsWork OutAdmireInstance80sTalking Heads
Author:Todd Rundgren
Create image