30 Years Ago Quotes & Sayings

Please don't ask me any questions about the politics of 30 years ago. — Helen Reddy

I'm playin' music for a certain type of person. Fortunately, there are more and more of us. At least there are more comin' to see me than there were 30 years ago or so. — Mose Allison

I remember once when I was young, and I was coming back from some place, a movie or something.
I was on the subway and there was a girl sitting across from me and she was wearing this dress that was bottoned queer up right to here, she was the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.
And I was shy then, so when she would look at me I would look away, then afterwards when I would look back she would look away.
Then I got to where I was gonna get off, and got off, the doors closed, and as the train was pulling away she looked right at me and gave me the most incredible smile. It was awful, I wanted to tear the doors open.
And I went back every night, same time, for two weeks, but she never showed up.
That was 30 years ago and I don't think that theres a day that goes by that I don't think about her, I don't want that to happen again.
Just one dance ?. — Jack Engelhard

We are on Sunday night because that is where they put us 30-odd years ago. I think we became a habit. — Morley Safer

When we think about online learning, it's such 'early days.' Bill Gates is a wildly smart insightful guy. Yet, even a guy as smart and insightful as that, 30 years ago can say things like, 'Who's every going to need more than 640K of memory?' — Reed Hastings

Between 1950 and 2012, annual hours worked per worker fell significantly throughout Europe - by about 40 percent in Germany and the Netherlands - but by only 10 percent in the United States. Richer, college-educated Americans are working more than they did 30 years ago, particularly when you count time working and answering e-mail at home. — Anonymous

I was aware that the teaching of drawing was being stopped almost 30 years ago. And I always said, 'The teaching of drawing is the teaching of looking.' A lot of people don't look very hard. — David Hockney

In a lot of ways I think food is starting to take the place in culture that rock and roll took 30 years ago. — Jonathan Gold

A little more than 30 years ago, Bernie Marcus, Arthur Blank, Pat Farrah and I got together and founded The Home Depot. — Kenneth Langone

A hundred years ago-even 20 or 30 years ago-it was possible, if not always easy, to close major business by calling on and satisfying a key decision-maker. Today, every piece of business entails multiple decisions, and those decisions are virtually never made by the same person. Not only do you have to contend with multiple decisions, but the people who make those decisions may not even work in the same place. — Brian Tracy

Twelve years ago me and Allanah became really sick of writing pop songs, ... Eventually we dug a grave for the Thompson Twins, pushed them in there, and then moved to New Zealand. Before that I'd lived for a long time in south London where reggae was the music of the streets around me. You'd hear it booming out of people's windows and shops, and you could buy great old reggae singles for 50p (NZ1.30) in second hand shops. I'd always loved that sound, so soon after we got here I started making electronic dub records with my mate Rakai Karaitiana as International Observer. — Tom Bailey

I started cooking 30-something years ago. When I was 14, 15, I was a short-order cook in a snack bar. That was at a place called the Gran Centurions. It was an Italian-American swim club my parents belonged to. — Tom Colicchio

I think we need a very, very serious effort, primarily through tax policy to provide incentives and encouragement for people to save and invest and expand their businesses and to create more jobs. The kind of thing we did in the early Reagan years, 30 years ago. I think that's essential. — Dick Cheney

If you look at Hollywood today, compared to five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, the change from moment to moment has always been extraordinary. It never stops moving. — Joseph McGinty Nichol

I could write songs about politics, but I'm conscious of not writing songs that sound the same as the ones I wrote 30 years ago. — Paul Weller

What we have now is doctors who are actually better technically at what they're doing in their specialty than 30 or 40 years ago, but we lost the relationship, when the doctor would look people in the eye and say, 'I care about you. We can do this together.' — Mehmet Oz

It's an eclectic film and I think we served the novel really well. And we had a great cast who worked for free. Everyone read it and said, I'm in, from Nick [Nolte] to Albert [Finney] to Omar [Epps] to Barbara [Hershey]. We really had fun and shot it in a very short time. I think the subject matter is more topical today, more to the point, than it was 30 years ago, when it concerned the Vietnam War. — Bruce Willis

In the developed world, we live 30 years longer, on average, than our ancestors born a century ago, but the price we pay for those added years is the rise of chronic diseases. — S. Jay Olshansky

Take air quality in the United States today: It's about 30 percent better than it was 25 years ago, even though there are now more people driving more cars. — Jared Diamond

Hostility towards China distorted Australia's international affairs for 20 years until 1972, but reconciliation with China 30 years ago had produced a quarter century of constructive bipartisan relations with our region and the world, unmatched in Australian history. — Gough Whitlam

25, 30 years ago, that meant something, they were making some money. And they were doing all sorts of comedy, screaming at the audience, basically crowd control. And then there was the whole urban comedy scene. — Bob Saget

We really are living in an age of information overload. Google estimates that there are 300 exabytes (300 followed by 18 zeros) of human-made information in the world today. Only four years ago there were just 30 exabytes. We've created more information in the past few years than in all of human history before us. — Daniel Levitin

other words, he is more closely related to any of the Neanderthal samples, all of which date from at least 30,000 years ago, than he is to any living man, woman or child on the planet. — Frank Cavallo

At one point I learned transcendental meditation. This was 30-something years ago. It took me back to the way that I naturally was as a child growing up way in the country, rarely seeing people. I was in that state of oneness with creation and it was as if I didn't exist except as a part of everything. — Alice Walker

Sometimes I ask myself, "Should I be out in a club?" But it's about realising I don't need to be always chasing after being who I was 20 or 30 years ago. — Marc Almond

Postal service of today is far removed from that of 30 years ago when reform was last enacted. — John M. McHugh

I mean, as long as it doesn't have a bra attached, guys can take a risk and wear stylish things that went out of style 30 years ago. As things go around, they come around. — Steven Tyler

I'm glad mainstream culture is starting to catch up to where lesbian-feminism was 30 years ago. — Alison Bechdel

I am half-surprised to find that as I go on I get more and more confirmed in the old advanced Liberal principles, economic, social, & political, with which I entered Parliament 30 years ago. — Henry Campbell-Bannerman

We need to go back to the way it was 30 years ago, when everybody had Grandma and Grandpa, and we were willing to pass moral judgments about right and wrong. — Steven Tyler

I first met Walt Disney 25 or 30 years ago. — Paul Winchell

What I learned at that moment on the subway 30 years ago, staring at my blank passport, was this: If you have an impulse to do something, and it's not totally irresponsible, why not do it? It might just be the journey you've always needed. — Timothy Hutton

There really wasn't an environmental movement 30 years ago. The Sierra Club national office in 1969 consisted of one full-time volunteer. — Denis Hayes

All the events you have experienced in your lifetime up to this moment have been created by your thoughts and beliefs you have held in the past. They were created by the thoughts and words you used yesterday, last week, last month, last year, 10, 20, 30, 40, or more years ago, depending on how old you are. — Louise L. Hay

I've evolved, but I'm the same dude, I'm just in a different place. We all change, we all grow. I shouldn't be in the same place that I was 30 years ago; I should be more intelligent, you know. — Ice-T

I've been wearing hearing aids for a long time. The technology available now is simply unbelievable. When I compare the new digital products to what we had 30 years ago, it's an amazing difference ... There was a time when I couldn't hear what most people said to me, most of the time. But with the hearing aids, I understand just about everything ... it really is very impressive. — Arnold Palmer

What kind of America do people want to leave for their children? What horrors are down the road, stuff that was unthinkable 30 years ago? — Randall Terry

Most of my last 30 years have been like that. Results and manifestations of things I'd dreamed of as a young kid and wanted as a child and as a young man. I realized it maybe 30 years ago. I thought, "This is unreal. This has happened as I expected it to, as I'd pictured it." My whole life has been like that and I'm fascinated by that power that we all have. That we create our lives as we go. — Anthony Hopkins

Theater is a physical activity as much as anything. It's harder for me to learn the lines than it was 30 years ago. At the same time, I'll never quit working in the theater - until I can't memorize two lines back to back. — Brian Dennehy

Uhhh yea, just did. 30 years ago. You — Sue Monk Kidd

All we're really doing is repeating technologies that were tried 10, 20, 30 years ago ... it's just that it was too expensive, too unusable, and we didn't have the enabling technologies to make it possible. — Aaron Levie

I think my philosophy has evolved over the years. I started teaching almost 15 years ago and I've learned that how one student learns is obviously much different than how another student learns and so I've had to figure out how to get through to people honestly without hurting their feelings - which is no easy task just in the scope of being a human being, much less in the classroom, but which is something that is more important to me now than it was when I was 30 - and to show them a path to improving. — Tod Goldberg

I don't like to dwell on the past. I'm interested in Fischerandom now, I am working on a new clock, I'm trying to make chess a more exciting game today. I am not interested in sitting in my rocking chair thinking what I did 10, 20 or 30 years ago. — Bobby Fischer

Immigration was a huge force in changing my outlook. I moved to America 30 years ago. I had to reassess my beliefs, especially about women's roles. — Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Simply because one is Black or Latino or lesbian or gay or whatever does not guarantee the person's fidelity to a body of politics that empowers the particular constituency that they supposedly represent. The number of black elected officials has risen from 100 in 1964 to more than 9000 today. The number of African Americans who were in congress 30 years ago was about five; today it is over 40, an 800 percent increase. But have Blacks experienced an 800 percent increase in real power? It hasn't happened. So, I think the emphasis of this liberal notion of social change by working solely within the established electoral system is just fatally flawed. — Manning Marable

The fact that you see salarymen reading manga and pornography on the trains and being unafraid, unashamed or anything, is something you wouldn't have seen 30 years ago, with people who grew up under a different system of government. They would have been far too embarrassed to open a book of cartoons or dirty pictures on a train. But that's what we have now in Japan. We are a country of children. — Hideaki Anno

Forty years ago two-thirds of children walked or biked to school; today 10 percent do. A generation ago 70 percent of children played outside; today the rate is down to 30 percent.209 — Steven Pinker

Any outside use of military power would at best furnish a temporary respite from the processes that we see playing out. We know that because we have been through all this before. The "surge" of several years ago was supposed to provide space and time for Iraqi political interests to work out their differences. 30,000 additional U.S. troops failed to lead to any working out of those differences, and the outcome is the mess we see today. — Paul R. Pillar

Discovery peaked 30 years ago. It takes no feat of the imagination. It takes no feat of intellect to conclude we now face the corresponding peak in production in 2005. — Gordon Campbell

human handprint made about 30,000 years ago, on the wall of the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave in southern France. Somebody tried to say, 'I was here! — Yuval Noah Harari

One of the funny things about the racism of the system, when I started 30 years ago, I'm in an area called Koreatown and most of the kids were Asian. And when the kids did well, people said, "Well, of course, they did well. They're Asians." But when we had this huge influx of Latino children from Central America, they said, "Oh, you're gonna have problems now." — Rafe Esquith

For one, a modified vegetable oil that makes asphalt less likely to crack in the winter or turn to tar in the summer. Cargill started selling it two years ago and has already shipped 30 million pounds of the product around the world. The plan is to be selling 100 million pounds of it a year by 2020. Another big win could be soybean oil that can be tweaked into foam for car seats. — Anonymous

When [my friend] had her kid, she was like, "9:30?! I'm not living in Barcelona. I need dinner at 6." I never got that until now. Four years ago, when I met her, I thought that was extreme. I was like, "I love Barcelona!" Now, I'm so mad when someone suggests an 8 pm reservation because that means we won't eat until 8:30 or 9 pm. Forget it! — Drew Barrymore

Going further back, have the seventy or so turbulent millennia since the Cognitive Revolution made the world a better place to live? Was the late Neil Armstrong, whose footprint remains intact on the windless moon, happier than the nameless hunter-gatherer who 30,000 years ago left her handprint on a wall in Chauvet Cave? If not, what was the point of developing agriculture, cities, writing, coinage, empires, science and industry? — Yuval Noah Harari

Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The — Yuval Noah Harari

At the beginning, I felt sort of reluctant about my music from my past. But in the last couple of years, I felt good about what I did in the past. The way I see my work, time passes from the time I performed or recorded a work. When I look at it now, 25 years or 30 years ago, if I see that it has value today, I will agree to release it. — Yoshi Wada

I try to find the books that I lost or forgot more than 30 years ago on another continent, with the hope and dedication and bitterness of those who search for their first lost books, books that if found I wouldn't read anyway, because I've already read them over and over, but that I would look at and touch just as the miser strokes the coins under which he's buried ... Books are like ghosts — Roberto Bolano

Most of the groups I worked with 30 years ago are either dead or dead broke. And it's a shame. — Ronnie Spector

We have enforced a Darwinian process on wolves, turning them into the shy and elusive animals they've become. They didn't have that fear of us 30,000 years ago. We didn't have gunpowder; we had rocks. Wolves would have seen us as lunch, and we were weak and slow and tasty. — Bruce Cameron

Junk food companies are acting very much like tobacco companies did 30 years ago. — Mark Bittman

Nutrition matters for everybody, but you can't major in it at Harvard. Most top scientists go into other fields. Most of the big studies were done 30 or 40 years ago, and most are seriously flawed. The food pyramid that told us to eat low fat and enormous amounts of grains was probably more a product of lobbying by Big Food than real science; its chief impact has been to aggravate our obesity epidemic. There's plenty more to learn: we know more about the physics of faraway stars than we know about human nutrition. It won't be easy, but it's not obviously impossible: exactly the kind of field that could yield secrets. — Peter Thiel

Almost 30 years ago, I started seeking help from a counselor with a master's of social work in New York City, but we were never a good match. It was like being in a bad relationship, except the guy could actually bill my health insurance company for lousy dates. — Gina Barreca

The appearance of new ways of thinking and communicating, between 70,000 and 30,000 years ago, constitutes the Cognitive Revolution. What caused it? We're not sure. The most commonly believed theory argues that accidental genetic mutations changed the inner wiring of the brains of — Yuval Noah Harari

You see, 30 years ago I didn't have near the audience I have now. My tapes on the cults have reached a circulation of 15 million. those are not my figures but the figures of the people who distribute them. — Walter Martin

Why is ADHD so much more common in the United States today than it was 30 or 40 years ago? And why is it so much more common today in the United States than elsewhere? My answer is "the medicalization of misbehavior. — Leonard Sax

If you have always believed that everyone should play by the same rules and be judged by the same standards, that would have gotten you labeled a radical 60 years ago, a liberal 30 years ago and a racist today. — Thomas Sowell

I think no one has written a history of the great coaches who were around 30 to 40 years ago who taught the fundamentals. — Oscar Robertson

Americans now know that housing prices can go down and they can go down by 10, 20, 30, and in some cases, 40 or 50 percent. We know they can go down. But five years ago, we thought they could only go up. — Bill Gross

A lot of people like to live on laurels that happened 20 or 30 years ago, but it's nice to get awards. It's nice to be labeled and things like that, but I'm not sure everybody qualifies. — Tim Conway

Imagine early hominid life as a tense balance of power between the alpha (and an ally or two) and the larger set of males who are shut out of power. Then arm everyone with spears. The balance of power is likely to shift when physical strength no longer decides the outcome of every fight. That's essentially what happened, Boehm suggests, as our ancestors developed better weapons for hunting and butchering beginning around five hundred thousand years ago, when the archaeological record begins to show a flowering of tool and weapon types.30 Once early humans had developed spears, anyone could kill a bullying alpha male. And if you add the ability to communicate with language, and note that every human society uses language to gossip about moral violations,31 then it becomes easy to see how early humans developed the ability to unite in order to shame, ostracize, or kill anyone whose behavior threatened or simply annoyed the rest of the group. — Jonathan Haidt

Over 30 years ago, Airbus was founded by a European consortium of French, German, and later Spanish and British companies to compete in the large commercial aircraft industry with U.S. companies. — Norm Dicks

Everybody would be better off if they could buy housing for only, let's say, a carrying charge of one-quarter of their income. That used to be the case 50 years ago. Buyers had to save up and make a higher down payment, giving them more equity - perhaps 25 or 30 percent. But today, banks are creating enough credit to bid up housing prices again. — Michael Hudson

If the same family were always on the bottom, then you'd have big resentments. But if DuPonts go down and Pampered Chef up, [that's good]. That much churn makes people think the system is fairer. Buffett: We don't like churn now, but we liked it more 30-40 years ago. — Charlie Munger

I believe very strongly, and have fought since many years ago - at least over 30 years ago - to get architecture not just within schools, but architecture talked about under history, geography, science, technology, art. — Richard Rogers

In the beginning when I sat next to Tom Brokaw on the 'Today' show, the stories I was interested in were those having to do with women and children and learning and health. In those days, 25 to 30 years ago, that was called soft news, and not in a nice way. — Jane Pauley

Our favorite: a former garbage dump converted into a riverside park. I first ran there more than 30 years ago when a marathon passed through this park that later became home to Pre's Trail. — Joe Henderson

I started doing '30 Rock' and started writing 'Mystery Team' at the beginning of that. While I was doing 'Mystery Team,' I started practicing stand-up. While I was doing stand up, I got 'Community.' It's like I planted trees six years ago, and now they have fruit. — Donald Glover

When Paul Allen and I started Microsoft over 30 years ago, we had big dreams about software. We had dreams about the impact it could have. — Bill Gates

I built the windmill 30 years ago in Tefen, and I think it was the right thing to build at that time, and I don't think that we did much with the solar or with windmills. Not much was done. I think we were too busy. — Stef Wertheimer

More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, 'Survive' and 'Babylonian Gorgon,' were great and made many of my mix tapes. — Henry Rollins

I believe the prayers of 30 years ago are not lost. We may not see the results of our labour or sacrifice immediately, but in due time they will produce much fruit. — T. B. Joshua

I was speaking on the radio in South Texas [in 2016], and I was speaking to Hispanics, and I said 'You know, you probably vote Democrat because your parents always voted Democrat, and your grandparents always voted Democrat, but let me tell you something. Thirty years ago in Texas, there were two parties - liberal Democrats and conservative Democrats. Looking at your principles, your values as Hispanics, in all probability your parents were conservative Democrats. The conservative Democrats of 30 years ago are Republicans today!' — Rafael Cruz

If Harvey had not been taken from us 30 years ago, I think he would want me to say to all the gay and lesbian kids out there tonight who have been told they are less than by the churches, by the government, by their families, that you are beautiful, wonderful creatures of value, and that no matter what anyone tells you, God does love you and that very soon, I promise you, you will have equal rights, federally, across this great nation of ours. — Dustin Lance Black

Whether Sapiens are to blame or not, no sooner had they arrived at a new location than the native population became extinct. The last remains of Homo soloensis are dated to about 50,000 years ago. Homo denisova disappeared shortly thereafter. Neanderthals made their exit roughly 30,000 years ago. The last dwarf-like humans vanished from Flores Island about 12,000 years ago. They left behind some bones, stone tools, a few genes in our DNA and a lot of unanswered questions. They also left behind us, Homo sapiens, the last human species. — Yuval Noah Harari

We've made some heroic efforts, but the Earth as a whole is in worse shape today than 30 years ago, ... There's been 30 more years of greenhouses gases, species extinctions and population growth. — Denis Hayes

I gave up on new poetry myself 30 years ago when most of it began to read like coded messages passing between lonely aliens in a hostile world. — Russell Baker

That's not how national security works ... I don't care what the Supreme Court said 30 years ago or what some judge said 15 minutes ago. This is America, and our government is collecting way too damn much data on we the private citizens! — Mark Levin

Adjusted for inflation, somebody going to college today to a state university, is paying about 300 percent of what her mom or dad did just 30 years ago. — Elizabeth Warren

I detest computers. If you had a device like that 30 years ago that froze up constantly, misbehaved constantly, lost your information and screwed up when you needed it the most, it would have been laughable. — Tom Scholz

And I'm sure they all played by the rules, just liked I did. By the way, when I got laid off four and a half years ago, the stock of my company was at an all-time high. Our CEO retired. He was paid $70 million. Maybe now that is only worth $30 million. Or maybe in a few years if he plays by the rules it will be worth $130 million. I'll still be worth nothing. And I won't have a home or my children. You see why I wonder about playing by the rules? Because I always do. As a result, you're standing where I sleep. — Ken Goldstein

Since There are so many questions about what the president was doing over 30 years ago, what is it that he did after his honorable discharge from the National Guard? Did he make speeches alongside Jane Fonda denouncing America's racist war in Vietnam? — Jeff Gannon

Helmut, if I had known that one can make it to 90 on 60 cigarettes a day, I would have started smoking 30 years ago. [at Former German Chancellor Helmut Schmidt's 90th birthday] — Henry Kissinger

Your life at this exact moment is a direct result of choices you made once upon a time. Thirty minutes or 30 year ago. — Sarah Ban Breathnach

As animals have no idea of the holy or the devil, they have no idea of the beautiful. The opinion held by some scientists that apes could paint, based on the 'paintings' apes had done, proved to be quite wrong. It has been confirmed that apes only imitate man. So- called 'ape art' surely does not exist. On the contrary, the cave men from Cromagnon onward knew how to paint and care. Their drawings have been found in caves of the Sahara, in Spain at Altamira, in Franc at Lascaux, and recently in Poland at Mashicka. Many of these pictures are thought to be more than 30,000 years old. Some time ago, a group of Soviet archeologists discovered a set of musical instruments, made 20,000 years ago, near the town of Chernigov in the Ukraine. — Alija Izetbegovic

10 years ago [in 2006], nearly 90 percent of those albums sold enough in that year to reach Gold status. 10 years later, about 30 percent were eligible. With the new rules, we figure about 40 percent of the top 200 best-sellers for the year will be eligible. We were very cautious in our approach to changing how we calculate what is eligible because the integrity of the process is our foremost consideration. It's difficult to get certified sales awards, and it's a big deal and we didn't want there to be a huge change in how many would be eligible. — Cary Sherman

It's the same as Keith Richards. People still ask him the same questions they asked him 30 years ago, even though he's a completely different person. And I'm a completely different person than I was 15 years ago. — Scott Weiland

Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago. — Steve Erickson

Sir John Templeton, not only the world's greatest investor but also one of the greatest human beings, shared something with me almost 30 years ago: he said that he's never known anyone who tithed - meaning the person gave 8% or 10% of what he earned to religious or charitable organizations over a ten-year period - who didn't massively grow his financial wealth. — Anthony Robbins

The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines. — Jerry Saltz

Look, I think that when we started Virgin Atlantic 30 years ago, we had one 747 competing with the airlines that had an average of 300 planes each. Every single one of those have gone bankrupt because they didn't have customer service. They had might, but they didn't have customer service, so customer service is everything in the end. — Richard Branson