1970s Quotes

1. "Economics ought to be a magpie discipline, taking in philosophy, history and politics. But heterodox approaches have long since been banished from most faculties, claims Tony Lawson. In the 1970s, when he started teaching at Cambridge, the economics faculty still boasted legends such as Nicky Kaldor and Joan Robinson. "There were big debates, and students would study politics, the history of economic thought." And now? "Nothing. No debates, no politics or history of economic thought and the courses are nearly all maths."How do elites remain in charge? If the tale of the economists is any guide, by clearing out the opposition and then blocking their ears to reality. The result is the one we're all paying for."
Author: Aditya Chakrabortty

2. "I know some things when I start. I know, let's say, that the play is going to be a 1970s or a 1930s play, and it's going to be about a piano, but that's it. I slowly discover who the characters are as I go along."
Author: August Wilson

3. "Britain in the 1970s was undoubtedly an economic mess because of the oil price explosion."
Author: Barbara Castle

4. "First, I'd become an avid reader of blogs, especially music blogs, and they seemed to be where the critical-thinking action was at, to have the kind of energy that I associate with rock writing of the 1970s or Internet e-mail discussion lists a decade ago."
Author: Carl Wilson

5. "Back in the 1970s, dissidents in the Soviet Union were often hospitalized in mental institutions and given drugs similar to the ones used to treat depression today. The reasoning was that you had to be insane to be unhappy in the Socialist Workers' Utopia. When the people treating depression receive status and prestige from the very system that their patients are unhappy with, they are unlikely to affirm the basic validity of the patient's withdrawal from life. "The system has to be sound -- after all, it validates my professional status -- therefore the problem must be with you."
Author: Charles Eisenstein

6. "I was already writing about the idea of a 'multiverse' in the 1970s, though I might have called it the 'pluriverse.' How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil."
Author: Charles Jencks

7. ".."consider this. It took the earth's population thousand of years-from the early dawn of man all the way to the early 1800s-to reach one billion people. Then astoundingly, it took only about a hundred years to double the population to two billion in the 1920s. After that, it took a mere fifty years for the population to double again to four billion in the 1970s. As you can imagine, we're well on track to reach eight billion very soon. Just today, the human race added another quarter-billion people to planet Earth. A quarter million. And this happens ever day-rain or shine. Currently every year er 're adding the equivalent of the entire country of Germany."
Author: Dan Brown

8. "We experienced similar fears in the 1880s, at the end of World War I and II. And we ran out in the 1970s."
Author: Daniel Yergin

9. "In the early 1970s. 1971, '72. The rooms were closing down, record labels weren't signing acoustic acts any more. Although they had been pretty much been getting out of that for some time before that."
Author: Dave Van Ronk

10. "Mimicque—zombies—can only be killed with an iron or obsidian blade, so don't think you can just act like the wrestler El Santo in the 1970s film El Santo Versus the Mummies of Guanajuato. If a walking undead is after you, run. Let the experts take care of the zombies."
Author: David Bowles

11. "Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America's inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country's inability to govern itself."
Author: David Brooks

12. "Since the 1970S, financial innova­tions such as the securitisation of mortgage debt and the spreading of investment risks through the creation of derivative markets, all tacitly (and now, as we see, actually) backed by state power, have permitted a huge flow of excess liquidity into all facets of urbanisa­tion and built environment construction worldwide."
Author: David Harvey

13. "In our family "whim-wham" is code, a defanged reference to any number of moods and psychological disorders, be they depressive, manic, or schizoaffective. Back in the 1970s and '80s - when they were all straight depression - we called them "dark nights of the soul." St. John of the Cross's phrase ennobled our sickness, spiritualized it. We cut God out of it after the manic breaks started in 1986, the year my dad, brother, and I were all committed. Call it manic depression or by its new, polite name, bipolr disorder. Whichever you wish. We stick to our folklore and call it the whim-whams."
Author: David Lovelace

14. "I imagine it was much different in the 1970s. That was the Renaissance for black actors, albeit in blaxploitation movies. There was a much greater preponderance of work then than there is now."
Author: Don Cheadle

15. "I wish I was a teenager in the 1970s."
Author: Ellen Page

16. "I think 'Saturday Night Live', starting in the 1970s, really gave women an outlet to be funny. A lot of those women went on to have film careers, from Kristen Wiig now to Tina Fey and Gilda Radner."
Author: Emma Stone

17. "The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture."
Author: Eric Allin Cornell

18. "In the 1970s, New York City avoided bankruptcy because wise political leaders like Gov. Hugh L. Carey believed both in strong labor unions and robust banks and companies."
Author: Felix Rohatyn

19. "The Olympic stadium may have been built only in the early 1970s but it was clear for a long time it had no future. For many reasons it is not good enough for modern football and today's fans."
Author: Franz Beckenbauer

20. "There are a few things that I will hopefully be credited for as a pioneer. One is my four-mallet playing. Another one is the starting what was first called jazz rock in 1967 when I started my first band, later became jazz fusion by the 1970s."
Author: Gary Burton

21. "Between the Great Depression and the 1970s, private business was viewed with suspicion even in most capitalist economies.Businesses were, so the story goes, seen as anti-social agents whose profit-seeking needed to be restrained for other, supposedly loftier, goals, such as justice, social harmony, protection of the weak and even national glory."
Author: Ha Joon Chang

22. "Remember, until the 1970s, the spread of democracy has always been accompanied by the decline of inequality. The more democratic our societies have been, the more equal they have been becoming. Now we have the reverse tendency. The spread of democracy now is very much accompanied by the increase in inequality."
Author: Ivan Krastev

23. "Many young men in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down - like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or unjust causes such as the Vietnam War."
Author: Jackson Katz

24. "Back in the mid-1970s, we adopted some fairly ambitious goals to improve efficiency of our cars. What did we get? We got a tremendous boost in efficiency."
Author: Jay Inslee

25. "In the 1970s when I started in the art world, no self-respecting artist would have stood in line to try to get on a television show. It never would have happened."
Author: Jeffrey Deitch

26. "In the 1970s, after the Damansky Island clashes, a joke began circulating: 'Optimists study English; pessimists study Chinese; and realists learn to use a Kalashnikov."
Author: John Vaillant

27. "By the time I began my study of physics in the early 1970s, the idea of unifying gravity with the other forces was as dead as the idea of continuous matter. It was a lesson in the foolishness of once great thinkers. Ernst Mach didn't believe in atoms, James Clerk Maxwell believed in the aether, and Albert Einstein searched for a unified-field theory. Life is tough."
Author: Lee Smolin

28. "It was actually an Israeli cartoonist, Nurit Karlin, who made me think that I could draw for 'The New Yorker.' I saw her work published in the magazine in the early 1970s - she was the only woman working as a cartoonist at 'The New Yorker' at the time."
Author: Liza Donnelly

29. "In America today, the percentage of children and adolescents who are defined as overweight is more than double what it was in the early 1970s."
Author: Lois Capps

30. "When I was a physics major in the late 1970s, my very few fellow female students and I had high hopes that women would soon stand equal with men in science. But progress has proved slower than many of us imagined."
Author: Margaret Wertheim

31. "Mexico, as it was in the 1970s—and isn't now—was my Paris. With Mexicans, Europeans, and Americans I celebrated life and the journey, which took on qualities of a pilgrimage in which every moment was a movable feast and every place was a shrine. Among the intricately carved ruins in the jungle at Palenque, I partook of the Mayan sacrament, the sacred psilocybin mushroom, and there I learned to see."
Author: Mason West

32. "In spite of advances in technology and changes in the economy, state government still operates on an obsolete 1970s model. We have a typewriter government in an Internet age."
Author: Matt Blunt

33. "During the 1970s and 1980s Gibson did use my likeness, but we never signed anything. This new Signature model is the first time we struck a formal written deal for a guitar with my name on it."
Author: Neal Schon

34. "What the Acropolis in Athens looked like, including the Parthenon of the gods, is best told today at the British Museum in London, which houses the marble statuary removed by Lord Elgin, the British ambassador to Constantinople in 1801-05, and sold at a knockdown price (only 23 million dollars in our money) to the British Museum a couple of decades later. Although Elgin had or bought the permission of the Turkish sultan then ruling Greece, some contemporaries, including the poet and pro-Greek activist Lord Byron, already denounced the Elgin Marbles as 'pillage.' So the Greek government has claimed since the 1970s, but the British won't return them."
Author: Norman F. Cantor

35. "In the past, the U.S. has shown its capacity to reinvent its gifts for leadership. During the 1970s, in the aftermath of the Nixon abdication and the Ford and Carter presidencies, the whole nation peered into the abyss, was horrified by what it saw and elected Ronald Reagan as president, which began a national resurgence."
Author: Paul Johnson

36. "I joined the PQ in the 1970s because of the issue of sovereignty. And that's why I wake up in the morning. A woman who gives birth to a country, that would be interesting."
Author: Pauline Marois

37. "Fear of foreign domination in India led the Janata Party, in the 1970s, to push for partial Indian ownership of all multinational firms within the country. The result was a spectacular pullback, by companies such as IBM and Coca-Cola, and a stagnant economy."
Author: Peter Blair Henry

38. "Must you always speak with so many pop culture references?""I must, yes, but no one's making pop culture anymore, so I'm starting to feel dated. I haven't seen a new movie in two years. And you know what else I just realized?"The doctor stared at him."I'm never going to find out what the hell was going on with Lost. I mean, was it just sheer coincidence their plane crashed on the island or was it this Jacob guy pulling the strings all along? And how did most of them end up back in the 1970s with the Dharma people?"
Author: Peter Clines

39. "I became addicted to the movie-going experience in the 1970s, when I attended multiple screenings of films such as 'Chinatown', 'Jaws', 'Star Wars' and the original 'Rocky'."
Author: Richard Roeper

40. "At Camp Don Bosco, there were Bibles all over the place, mostly 1970s hippie versions like Good News for Modern Man. They had groovy titles like The Word or The Way, and translated the Bible into "contemporary English," which meant Saul yelling at Jonathan, "You son of a bitch!" (I Samuel 20:30). Awesome! The King James version gave this verse as "Thou son of the perverse rebellious woman," which was bogus in comparison. Maybe these translations went a bit far. I recall one of the Bibles translating the inscription over the cross, "INRI" (Iesus Nazaremus Rex Iudaeorum), as "SSDD" (Same Shit Different Day), and another describing the Last Supper — the night before Jesus' death, a death he freely accepted — where Jesus breaks the bread, gives it to his disciples, and says, "It's better to burn out than fade away," but these memories could be deceptive."
Author: Rob Sheffield

41. "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."
Author: Roger Mudd

42. "In the 1970s we saw a massive shift of household savings from the banks to the brokerage firms."
Author: Ron Chernow

43. "I can watch anything from 1970s West Coast rock to 1990s electro-funk - I don't care."
Author: Stephen Mangan

44. "The stagflation of the 1970s blessed us with damaging wage and price controls and the utterly counterintuitive supply-side notion - famously drawn on a napkin - that cutting taxes would lead to higher tax revenues."
Author: Steven Rattner

45. "I've been very influenced by folklore, fairy tales, and folk ballads, so I love all the classic works based on these things -- like George Macdonald's 19th century fairy stories, the fairy poetry of W.B. Yeats, and Sylvia Townsend Warner's splendid book The Kingdoms of Elfin. (I think that particular book of hers wasn't published until the 1970s, not long before her death, but she was an English writer popular in the middle decades of the 20th century.)I'm also a big Pre-Raphaelite fan, so I love William Morris' early fantasy novels.Oh, and "Lud-in-the-Mist" by Hope Mirrlees (Neil Gaiman is a big fan of that one too), and I could go on and on but I won't!"
Author: Terri Windling

46. "The dreams of the 1960s began to disappear in the 1970s. The economy collapsed, and so did the optimism of the Metabolists."
Author: Toyo Ito

47. "Cable TV brought the Braves into homes all across America in the 1970s, by the 1980s the Braves were "America's Team," and by the 1990s the Braves were the most dominant team in baseball."
Author: Tucker Elliot

48. "Surprisingly dramatic glow some minerals gave off when illuminated with ultraviolet light, or "black light." In daylight, for instance, the mineral fluorite is a drab, chalky color; in a dark room under UV light, though, fluorite glows a brilliant blue; the mineral calcite shines bright red; and aragonite gives off a neon green. If you've ever stepped into a teenager's cavelike room decorated with black-light posters (less common now than they were in the 1970s, when my three sons were growing up), you've seen another version of UV fluorescence in action."
Author: William M. Bass

49. "I loved London. In the 1970s... it was very exciting, really wild."
Author: Zaha Hadid

50. "If the world economy is going to revive, I believe commoditiesare going to lead it back up. If the world economy is not going torevive, commodities are still the place to be—especially with governmentsprinting so much money. Look at the 1970s. The worldeconomy was in the tank, but commodities did very well."
Author: Ziad K. Abdelnour

1970s Quotes Pictures