70s 80s Quotes & Sayings

One of my favourite films is called 'Lacombe Lucien,' directed by Louis Malle. The lead character in that film, like the lead characters in many '70s and '80s films, has a moral ambiguity to him. — Joe Cornish

I don't like to put tags on my music. I leave that to others. Seems like some people see me as the founder of "space disco", although that's a bit weird since there were lots of music from the late 70s and early 80s that easily fits into this genre. I can understand why we need genres, but I don't feel comfortable using any on my own music. — Hans-Peter Lindstrom

I grew up reading SF in the '70s and '80s, and I like fast, thought-provoking plots that take you places in fully realized worlds. — Kim Harrison

We, in the late '60s, '70s and '80s, are acting like we have just discovered freedom and liberation. But I'm sure that many women have worked for that for such a long time. — Angeles Mastretta

Reading poetry and reading the great works of the canon that we were reading in the '60s and the '70s and '80s was mind altering. — Anne Lamott

I don't have to come back, because I am still here! And I'm not an '80s thing. I already worked with my first band back in East Germany and that was soooo '70s, young man. I'm a '70s thing. If I'm a thing at all ... and an exciting thing. — Nina Hagen

From the '70s and '80s, the following songs immediately spring to my mind as candidates: "The Battle of Evermore," "Spirit of Eden," "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," "Close to the Edge," "In Your Eyes," "Thick as a Brick," "Cinema Show," "Echoes," and "The Killing Moon. — Bradley J. Birzer

I first started doing some somewhat technology-based shows in the '80s. If you wanted to get real technical about it, back in the '70s I used to open up with Utopia with just me on the stage with a four-track tape recorder. So, technically, I've been using the help of various devices pretty much throughout my career. — Todd Rundgren

I'm not an '80s fan. I'm more '70s New York pre-punk kind of thing, and I guess I grew up with '90s grunge, post-punk pop music. — Jessica Pare

Direct mail was the basis of a lot of new Right organizations in the '70s and early '80s, and it actually led to the downfall of the majority of them. It's very expensive, and you end up putting your organization more and more in debt if you're not successful with it. — Nina Easton

We are all a little bit hippy, a little bohemian. We take that from the culture we knew, from the '70s and the '80s. — Nicolas Maduro

One of the things about me is that I actually had marginally middle-class living from writing. For years and years, I actually wrote so much through the '70s and '80s that I made a living. And very rarely have I had to take another job. And now it's impossible for anybody coming up to make such a living. They've pissed in the temple, you know? — Richard Meltzer

Seattle was a rabid film town in the '70s and '80s because it rained so much. — John Requa

If you think the '80s were dumber than the '70s, either you weren't there or you weren't paying attention. — James Lileks

There's a focus that hasn't been there for ages and ages and some American bands are sounding quite English like they did in the late 70s and early 80s. — Graham Coxon

People love to talk about how the '70s are the only time they made movies about characters, and adult movies, and complicated people. But in the '80s, they got away with some of those too. — Elisabeth Shue

I'm definitely nostalgic about the music of my youth; The Clash and Fishbone and that whole music scene. I still have all that music to this day. There was some great music going on in the late 70s and 80s. — John Cusack

I'm used to the egos in the 1960s, '70s and '80s where people just expected massive success and thought it was their birth right to be successful. — Daryl Hall

As the final decade of the millennium dawned, there would be no greater expression of the cultural, economic, and social revolutions to come than fashion. What rock 'n' roll was to the '50s, drugs to the '60s, film to the '70s, and modern art to the '80s, fashion was to the '90s: the fuse, then the filter. — Maureen Callahan

When I started law school I was shocked to learn that our legal system traditionally had the man as the head and master of the family. As late as the '70s and '80s when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment, states like Louisiana still had a head and master law. — Patricia Ireland

In the '60s, '70s and '80s, everybody was pretty tense on the set. — Gloria Stuart

In Italy, especially in '70s and '80s, there was a lot of racism between north and south. And my mom immigrated from the south to the north, from Puglia, the heel of Italy. But what made me feel different was society, not my family. — Riccardo Tisci

Growing up in the '70s and '80s, science fiction and especially fantasy had such a stigma attached to them. I felt so punished and exiled for being devoted to these things. — Lev Grossman

I spent a few years here in Memphis, in the late '70s and early '80s, where I was studying a lot of country blues players and their styles. So it seems like every record I'll do, I will appropriate these blues styles that I remember. — Alex Chilton

Everyone knows Aquaman, probably from all the animation he's been in over the years from the '70s and the '80s, entering him into the pop culture. — Geoff Johns

And that's the one thing that people do not understand is that we have very low interest rates and if those go back to historical levels or even go back to scary thoughts that they're back in the late '70s, early '80s, then that's going to really be hard to actually pay off those debts. It's going to be a - it's going to be a very big problem. — Ben Quayle

It was a really interesting time in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, and the music scene was really, really interesting because you didn't have to be a virtuoso to make music, it was more about your desire to express things. — Jim Jarmusch

The '80s was wild compared to my real small childhood, which was late '70s. — Ice Cube

It got to the point in the late 70s and early 80s that I was spending so much money buying golden age comics that I could only justify it if I got work in the media. — Bill Mumy

The '70s and '80s were just the period during which the best soul music was created and the best records were done. — Don Cornelius

When I look at women, older than I am, in their 50s, 60, 70s, 80s, and I see women that I admire, I think, 'Oh, I get it; that's how I'm going to be.' I'm not scared. I want to be that. — Annette Bening

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

Insofar as craft and poetics in a poem have a politics, I wanted to avoid that brittle enjambed-prose-sentence-lyric verse, where you have standard sentences snapped off and scattered decoratively across the page (which I might go out on a limb and say was characteristic of some leftist poets, Beat poets, street poets and populist poets of the 70s and 80s - all of whom I basically view as comrades, I should probably say, to this day) and on the other hand I also wanted my poetics to operate differently than those more right-wing academics - in practice - even if in their poems or statements they proclaim public leftist views or ideas - they remain academic poets, operating in elite university-supported circles, institutionalized and reading before institutional audiences, awarding grants and awards to each other, sitting on each other's grants panels, awards and tenure committees, as Philip Levine admitted in an interview in Don't Ask, 'giving prizes to friends. — Sesshu Foster

I would get bullied a lot. You know, it was the '70s and '80s, so it was a lot of racism back then towards Indian people. And it wasn't actual hatred, it was just that blind, 'Let's pick on that guy.' You know, and you've got to figure that I was a very small kid. And I had a big mouth, so I'm sure that didn't help. — Russell Peters

The reality is that the NBA was in worse shape in the '70s and early '80s. People have convenient memories. — Mike Thibault

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

It was the case in the 70s and 80s that people believed music could change the world. But now people aren't making music because they want to change the world; they're making music because they want to just make a ton of money. — Sinead O'Connor

I'm a huge fan of the films of the '70s and even into the '80s, Sidney Lumet, all those films that used what was going on in people's lives as drama. And not only are you entertained, but hopefully have a greater understanding of your world coming out of it. — J. C. Chandor

I have done a series in the '60s, '70s and '80s. — Lee Majors

Everybody's still in the 70s and 80s musically, still making remakes. — Kool Keith

Shows in the '70s and '80s were a lot more provocative. Shows that are coming out now - like 'Black-Ish,' 'The Carmichael Show' - are showcasing people of color in a new way. It's not stereotypical. — Bresha Webb

My own strong feeling was that the gay liberation movement really got national attraction in the truest sense of the word later in the '70s, in the '80s, and especially in the '90s. — Tom Brokaw

And often it would be a woman who was in her 70s or 80s who would win the beauty contest, because bound feet never age. — Lisa See

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

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

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

I think anyone that grew up in the '70s and '80s grew up with Bob Barker and Wink Martindale and I think that was just always ... when you were a game show host, you were the man of the hour. — Guy Fieri

I remembered being young in the late '70s and early '80s and growing up at the height of the Cold War. I remembered how scared I was of nuclear weapons, how often I though about them and about the possibility of everything and everyone I knew vanishing in a second in temperatures hotter than the centre of the sun. — John Niven

Bowling really was a big American sport in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and then it kind of died off in the '80s. — Chris Hardwick

I think all of us thought that by the '70s, at the latest the '80s, all the world's problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought. — Janis Ian

I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies. — Jello Biafra

The people are maybe still as aware of the differences but they are more accepting of it that what we saw in the 70s and 80s, but the undercurrent is still there. There are maybe no racial slurs anymore, no firecrackers in mailboxes, the distinction is much more subtle. — Celeste Ng

The life of an action star is very short. I want to be an actor like Robert De Niro, like Dustin Hoffman or Clint Eastwood who in their 70s or 80s can still act. — Jackie Chan

My tastes range all over the place, from vocal standards to Motown to 70s funk & soul to 80s pop to film scores to artists like R.E.M., Ben Folds, Prince, Annie Lennox, the Police, Elvis Costello, Cat Stevens, the Ditty Bops, local bands that friends of mine are in, and the list goes on ... I have no single favorite genre or artist. — Stephanie D'Abruzzo

I often put any project I write in a different decade just to roll the thought around in my head. There's a thriller I've written that I think would be nice to set in the '70s or '80s, just to take cell phones away from the movie. There's nothing like the piercing ring of an old-school telephone to really scare an audience. — Joel Edgerton

I did love horror films from the '70s and '80s. That was my sweet spot. — Drew Barrymore

She's been a smack addict, she's had big success in Europe in the '70s, and she's lost everything. She's been rediscovered in the '80s, and as we meet her she's just about to sign a new recording contract. — Neil Tennant

When I think of Bollywood dance, I think of choreographies from the '70s and '80s. That was true Bollywood, what is now known as old school Bollywood. — Terence Lewis

I suppose I was much more serious-minded in the '70s and '80s. — Paul Weller

Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. — Naomi Wolf

When I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, by the time you were 16, you were kind of expected to be an adult. By the time we were 16 and able to drive, certainly by 17 or 18 and into college, you just had very little interaction with your parents. — Joe Meno

There's that thing about the '80s, the '40s and the '60s, and the '30s, the '50s and the '70s. Something about those odd decades in this century that weren't too pleasant. — Paul Kantner

If anyone looks back to the '70s, '80s with nostalgic rosy colored glasses and goes, 'Well, everything was awesome.' No, everything was not awesome! — John Oates

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

I was a big fan of X. I've probably seen 100 X shows during their time in the late '70s and early '80s. — Allison Anders

Even in the '70s and '80s, the television show Happy Days was aware of the irony of "cool." The cool character on Happy Days was "the Fonz," and he was ridiculous. His office was in a men's bathroom. That's not only not cool, that's not even sanitary. — Jim Gaffigan

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

Bonobo studies started in the '70s and came to fruition in the '80s. Then in the '90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world. — Frans De Waal

My kids are around pit bulls every day. In the '70s they blamed Dobermans, in the '80s they blamed German Shepherds, in the '90s they blamed the Rottweiler. Now they blame the Pit Bull. — Cesar Millan

I'm looking forward to locking swords with Douglas Henshall and working against the stunning backdrop of Shetland. I came to Scotland a lot in the 70s and 80s in various theatre productions and of course to film Hallam Foe but this is the furthest I've ever been. — Ciaran Hinds

In the '70s and '80s, what private equity did is it changed corporate America. It started holding companies accountable, and for the first time managers started thinking like owners. — Henry Kravis

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

The International Monetary Fund basically acted as the world's debt enforcers - "You might say, the high-finance equivalent of the guys who come to break your legs." I launched into historical background, explaining how, during the '70s oil crisis, OPEC countries ended up pouring so much of their newfound riches into Western banks that the banks couldn't figure out where to invest the money; how Citibank and Chase therefore began sending agents around the world trying to convince Third World dictators and politicians to take out loans (at the time, this was called "go-go banking"); how they started out at extremely low rates of interest that almost immediately skyrocketed to 20 percent or so due to tight U.S. money policies in the early '80s; how, during the '80s and '90s, this led to the Third World debt crisis; how the IMF then stepped in to insist that, in order to obtain refinancing, poor countries would be obliged to abandon price supports on — David Graeber

I lived at the Gramercy Park Hotel for about 10 years. It was terrific. It was a pleasantly run-down hotel of the '70s and '80s with a mix of older, rent-controlled apartment dwellers, Europeans and new wave and punk bands. The room service was great, the hamburger was terrific, and they had a doctor who made house calls. — Paul Shaffer

Having a separate bathroom for the black domestic was just the way things were done. It had faded out in new homes by the time the '70s and '80s rolled up. — Kathryn Stockett

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis. — LeRoy Neiman

There's a difference between music that's original and music that's retro. A lot of bands now are kind of retro 70s whether it's Kraut-rock or ... I've heard people suggest that we're kind of retro 80s. — Bill Orcutt

I started in the late 70s, beginning of the 80s, and I think I started to sing and make music as a therapy for myself; I never planned to be an artist; sometimes when I think about it it's crazy that I'm here, and I'm touring, and I'm doing what I'm doing. — Mari Boine

I'm not a one-hit wonder as some suggest. I've had a couple of hits, but still, all of my hits were in the '70s. There was pretty much nothing in the '80s, '90s, or in the first full decade into the next millennium. — Todd Rundgren

I do feel part of that generation of people who were rather idealistic in the '70s and became disillusioned in the '80s. Not just about social services issues, but the world. — Kazuo Ishiguro

When I was growing up in South Korea in the '70s and early '80s, the country was too poor to buy original records. Everything was bootlegged. — Ha-Joon Chang

I do have a lot of references coming out of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, but I don't consciously think, "I'm going to put this here and this there." It comes out of my unconscious, and I don't want it to be just retro. — Britta Phillips

I like adding little elements into the final mix. I'm more fond of the '70s glam than '80s. I have that style of vocals ... there are a lot of pop artists who are using the glam vibe in their music. I'm part of that wave. — Adam Lambert

When I was a kid growing up in the States in the late '70s and early '80s, as soon as 'Dallas' came on on a Friday night on CBS at 9 P.M., we stopped everything from that moment on as a family. — John Barrowman

Mobile notifications put people in a state of perpetual emergency interruption - similar to what 911 operators and air traffic controllers experienced back in the '70s and '80s. — Douglas Rushkoff

We're seeing TV series that are as good as movies were in the '70s and '80s - shows like 'The Wire,' 'The Sopranos' and 'Breaking Bad.' — Tahar Rahim

Prince is king to me. As this half-naked, short black guy who looked like a girl in the 70s and 80s, he was talking about women in a way that was very unusual because he didn't objectify them. — Robyn

Daft Punk and I belong to the Generation 75. We were born in 1975, so we are somewhat in the middle of the rebellion and freedom of the 70s and the consumer culture of the 80s. — Pedro Winter

I feel like I was hit by all of geek culture at once while I was growing up in the '70s and '80s. Saturday morning cartoons like 'Star Blazers' and 'Robotech.' Live action Japanese shows like 'Ultraman' and 'The Space Giants.' — Ernest Cline

I grew up in the '70s and '80s, at a time that I'd argue was the absolute golden age of American popular culture. Because not only did we have all of the fantastic new stuff in print and on screens, but we had a constant supply of everything that came before, as well. — Chris Roberson

Like my fictional protagonist Tom Thorne, I love country. My tastes go back a bit further than his do, and I still listen to stuff from the late '70s and early '80s. — Mark Billingham

We had some adverse conditions in the '60s, in the '70s and the '80s. The agency has risen above that in the past and will rise above that again. — Alan Shepard

Certainly there are dozens of over-50 actresses who look great: Sophia Loren, Susan Sarandon, Ursula Andress, Stefanie Powers, Raquel Welch, Barbara Eden, Joanna Lumley, Linda Gray - the list is endless, and these are just the actresses! I have many friends in their 60s, 70s and 80s, not in the limelight, but who all look absolutely stunning. — Joan Collins

The '80s made up for all the abuse I took during the '70s. I outlived all my critics. By the time I retired, everybody saw me as a venerable institution. Things do change. — Kareem Abdul-Jabbar

I understand that Detroit was a pretty rough place to grow up in the '70s and '80s. — Buzz Aldrin

We've become a little spoiled with menswear in particular because, of course, we've come off a period in the '70s and '80s when Armani, which is very soft, dominated menswear. And we've become obsessed with comfort. I actually don't like that. — Tom Ford

I was raised on the purest comedy there is: 'I Love Lucy.' I was raised watching 'Three's Company' and sitcoms of the '70s and '80s. — Mayim Bialik

I miss the comedy of the '70s and '80s, like 'Only Fools And Horses' and 'Fawlty Towers,' so I'm glad I'm put in that category. — Brendan O'Carroll

In the '70s and '80s there was an attempt in K-12 to teach science through art or art through science. The challenge today is how do you build the ethos of art and design into the academy of science. — John Maeda

Really, the '70s and '80s were a blur. — Manolo Blahnik