Z 1969 Quotes & Sayings

By refocusing our space program on Mars for America's future, we can restore the sense of wonder and adventure in space exploration that we knew in the summer of 1969. We won the moon race; now it's time for us to live and work on Mars, first on its moons and then on its surface. — Buzz Aldrin

I never got a stereo system until about 1969. It was only when I went to America in '68 and listened to FM radio; I really thought, 'Wow, there's something in this.' — Justin Hayward

Nixon did not anticipate the extent to which Kissinger, whom he barely knew when he appointed him national-security adviser in 1969, would be envious and high-strung - a maintenance project of the first order. — Robert Dallek

Name the eight men who made the final out in games that sent the Mets to the playoffs. Joe Torre, September 24, 1969. Glenn Beckert, October 1, 1973. Chico Walker, September 17, 1986. Lance Parrish, September 22, 1988. Dmitri Young, October 4, 1999. Keith Lockhart, September 27, 2000. Josh Willingham, September 18, 2006. Jay Bruce, September 26, 2015. — Greg W. Prince

In the period from 1945 to 1960, the number of orchestras in the country doubled, book sales rose some 250 percent, and art museums opened in most major cities. Ballet was quick to catch up: between 1958 and 1969 the number of ballet companies nationwide with more than twenty members nearly tripled. — Jennifer Homans

Race theorists, who are as old as imperialism itself, want to achieve racial purity in peoples whose interbreeding, as a result of the expansion of world economy, is so far advanced that racial purity can have meaning only to a numbskull. — Wilhelm Reich

In 1969, I wrote a musical called 'Mother Earth.' It was a rock musical with an ecology theme. We did it at the South Coast Repertory Theatre in Southern California where I was a member. It was a smash hit in this small theater. — Toni Tennille

Before 1975, if you knew the name Howard Sackler it was because he was the author behind the 1969 Broadway play The Great White Hope, which won Sackler the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle award as the year's Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A friend of film producer David Brown, Sackler accepted the offer to do a re-write on Jaws author Peter Benchley's script for the film version of his novel. Sackler's main contribution to the story was the back story that the shark fisherman, Quint, derived his hatred for sharks from having survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July of 1945 (in the film, Quint errantly states the date as "June the 29th, 1945"). — Louis R. Pisano

I often surprise people with the simple fact that your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA when it put two men on the moon in 1969. Computers are now powerful enough to record the electrical signals emanating from the brain and partially decode them into a familiar digital language. This makes it possible for the brain to directly interface with computers to control any object around it. The fast-growing field is called BMI (brain-machine interface), and the key technology is the computer. — Michio Kaku

I think up until '71 or '72, Herman's Hermits had our second and third Number One records in 1969 and 1970. You know, the first one was in 1964. It was just a question of the American success being so outrageous, that that attracted the most attention. — Peter Noone

In February 1969, 25 years ago, I arrived as a young, terrified PFC on this lonely little hill in Quang Ngai Province. Back then, the place seemed huge and imposing and permanent. — Tim O'Brien

Gadhafi's vicious regime has left Libya far worse than he found it on the day of his coup in 1969. — Elliott Abrams

Things felt pretty crazy on earth in 1969, but the cosmos was friendly. Astronauts had round-trip tickets; they got home. — David Ignatius

I was born and raised in Zambia in 1969. At the time of my birth, blacks were not issued birth certificates, and that law only changed in 1973. — Dambisa Moyo

Hence, what he wants - and it is openly admitted - is to implement nationalistic imperialism with methods he has borrowed from Marxism, including its technique of mass organization. But the success of this mass organization is to be ascribed to the masses and not to Hitler. It was man's authoritarian freedom-fearing structure that enabled his propaganda to take root. Hence, what is important about Hitler sociologically does not issue from his personality but from the importance attached to him by the masses. And what makes the problem all the more complex is the fact that Hitler held the masses, with whose help he wanted to carry out his imperialism, in complete contempt. — Wilhelm Reich

We do not need to divide America over who served and how. I have personally always believed that many served in many different ways. Someone who was deeply against the war in 1969 or 1970 may well have served their country with equal passion and patriotism by opposing the war as by fighting in it. — John F. Kerry

Carrying his books from one life into the next was nothing new to Zuckerman. He had left his family for Chicago in 1949 carrying in his suitcase the annotated works of Thomas Wolfe and Roget's Thesaurus. Four years later, age twenty, he left Chicago with five cartons of classics, bought secondhand out of his spending money, to be stored in his parents' attic while he served two years in the Army. In 1960, when he was divorced from Betsy, there were thirty cartons to be packed from the shelves no longer his; in 1965, when he was divorced from Virginia, there were just under sixty to cart away; in 1969, he left Bank Street with eighty-one boxes of books. — Philip Roth

Your cell phone today has more computer power than all of NASA when it put two men on the moon in 1969. — Michio Kaku

Why isn't the manuscript ready? Because every book is more work than anyone intended. If authors and editors knew, or acknowledged, how much work was ahead, fewer contracts would be signed. Each book, before the contract, is beautiful to contemplate. By the middle of the writing, the book has become, for the author, a hate object. For the editor, in the middle of editing, it has become a two-ton concrete necklace. However, both author and editor will recover the gleam in their eyes when the work is completed, and see the book as the masterwork it really is. — Samuel S. Vaughan

there is no such thing as poverty; only the absence of wealth (Jacobs, 1969; and see Piachaud, 2002 — Hartley Dean

Lucas began filming THX 1138 on Monday, September 22, 1969, shooting from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. in the still unfinished Bay Area Rapid Transit system. — Brian Jay Jones

Communicating online goes back to the Defense Department's Arpanet which started in 1969. There was something called Usenet that started in 1980, and this gave people an opportunity to talk about things that people on these more official networks didn't talk about. — Howard Rheingold

One of my pet irritations today is the whole idea that the great interest and upsurge in books about black life has just come along. 1937 and 1938 were the years when the interest in this whole subject was born.

from "Guidelines for Black Books: An Open Letter to Juvenile Editors" (1969) in Children and Literature (1973) — Augusta Baker

In 1969, 'Life' magazine came up to me and said they wanted to do a little story on the Hobie, and I ended up getting a six-page spread. I remember Robert Redford was on the cover, and when that magazine hit the stands, it was a whole new ballgame. — Hobart Alter

Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the Moon. July 1969 AD. We came in peace for all mankind. — Neil Armstrong

I was running for mayor of Syracuse - the first woman to run for mayor in our city, or in New York, and one of the first in the United States. I was known for my strong conservation plank. In 1969, the term 'conservation' was hardly on the tip of every citizen's tongue. — Karen DeCrow

A French friend brought over a load of Gainsbourg vinyl and I worked my way through it: by the time I got to L'Histoire De Melody Nelson (1969) I was thinking, 'How can this man have died before I got to know his music?' I was a convert. — Sylvie Simmons

The spirit that emerged outside a Mafia-run bar in 1969 became the pulse of the gay community and inspired not just an annual parade but ways to express gay pride in individual lives.
Stonewall happens every day. — Ann Bausum

There were protocols to meet for the historic occasion. On the lunar dust they placed mementoes for the five-deceased American and Soviet spacemen, Gus Grissom, Ed White, Roger Chaffee, Vladimir Komarov, and Yuri Gagarin (who died in a plane crash in 1968). They unsheathed a metal disc on the descent stage with engraved messages to future moon visitors. As Neil Armstrong read the plaque's words, his voice carried throughout the world. "Here men from the planet Earth first set foot upon the moon, July 1969, AD. We came in peace for all mankind." There was yet another small cargo - private and precious - carried by Neil Armstrong to the moon. It was not divulged at the time, but he carried the diamond-studded astronaut pin made especially for Deke Slayton by the three Apollo 1 astronauts and presented to him by their widows after that dreadful fire. — Alan Shepard

My politics were pretty anarchistic until 1969 when the Montreal police went on strike. Within hours, mayhem and rioting broke out and the Mounties had to be called in to restore order. It instilled in me that one's convictions can be subjected to empirical test. — Steven Pinker