Quotes About The Seventies

“If the seventies were bulbous, and the eighties sharp, the nineties were nothing but bogus.”

— Will Self

“Get transported back to the seventies !”

— Tom Evans

“In 1991, though, began an uprising that would propel those reptilian Republicans from a tiny splinter group into the state's dominant political faction, that would reduce Kansas Democrats to third-party status, and that would wreck what remained of the state's progressive legacy. We are accustomed to thinking of the backlash as a phenomenon of the seventies (the busing riots, the tax revolt) or the eighties (the Reagan revolution); in Kansas the great move to the right was a story of the nineties, a story of the present.”

— Thomas Frank

“Authoritarian Communism is, and should be, forever tainted by those real-world laboratories. But what of the contemporary crusade to liberate world markets? The coups, wars and slaughters to instill and maintain pro-corporate regimes have never been treated as capitalist crimes but have instead been written off as the excess of overzealous dictators, as hot fronts in the Cold War, and now of the War on Terror. If the most committed opponents of the corporatist economic model are systematically eliminated, whether in Argentina in the seventies or in Iraq today, that suppression is explained as part of the dirty fight against Communism or terrorism - almost never as the fight for the advancement of pure capitalism.”

— Naomi Klein

“The weaknesses of the system, the inherent dangers of being a part of a domestic monopoly in an industry open to other countries, had not yet revealed themselves. So, while other areas of the American economy remained competitive, no one challenged the auto industry until the full-scale assault of the Japanese in the seventies. When it finally came, the extent of American vulnerability surprised even those who had been critical.”

— David Halberstam

“What would the days be like now?
It was Mom who bound us all together, it was Mom who was at the center of Yngve's and my life, we knew that, Dad knew that, but perhaps she didn't. How else could she leave us like this?
Knives and forks clinking on plates, elbows moving, heads held stiff, straight backs. No one saying a word. That is us three, a father and two sons, sitting and eating. Around us, on all sides, it is the seventies.
The silence grows. And we notice it, all three of us, the silence is not the kind that can ease, it is the kind that lasts a lifetime. Well, of course, you can say something inside it, you can talk, but the silence doesn't stop for that reason.”

— Karl Ove KnausgÃ¥rd

“Every four years, the Republican Party pines for another Reagan. But Ronald Reagan, Governor of California for eight years, couldn't get elected in today's not-so-Golden State. Jerry Brown, Governor Moonbeam back in the Seventies, now presides as Governor Twilight, lead vampire of a malign alliance of unionized bureaucrats and a swollen dependency class that maintains them in office at the expense of a remorselessly shrinking productive class. As the nation's demographic profile trends ever more Californian perhaps Norquist's predictions of naturally conservative Hispanics pining for a new Coolidge will come to fruition. Or perhaps Bob Beckel's more crudely determinative analysis will prove correct
that, in a multicultural society, jostling identity groups will stick with the party of ethnocultural spoils.”

— Mark Steyn

“No, the seventies was a totally different sensibility and that allowed us to break new ground as a cop show.”

— Paul Michael Glaser

“Everyone loves the seventies because that's when movies were character-based, and you saw great characters and you saw very interesting filmmaking. There are interesting movies being made now, but it's harder and harder to make them.”

— Justin Bartha

“I can't even remember when the Seventies was.”

— Robbie Keane

“I can remember earning £5,000 a game playing for Hibs at the end of the Seventies. They let me commute from London, train on the Friday and play on Saturday. That lasted until my friends at the Inland Revenue decided to take two-thirds. That wasn't very entertaining for me.”

— George Best

“I certainly notice the vitality in Belfast, which wasn't there in the Seventies. There was a war going on then. Now there are cranes everywhere. There really is a sense of renewal and hope.”

— Liam Neeson

“To me, the Seventies were very inspirational and very influential ... With my whole persona as Snoop Dogg, as a person, as a rapper. I just love the Seventies style, the way all the players dressed nice, you know, kept their hair looking good, drove sharp cars and they talked real slick.”

— Snoop Dogg

“The floor was strewn with various animal skins-mainly sheep, I'd guess. It was kind of like being in a German porn flick from the seventies, set in a Tyrolean hunting lodge.”

— Michel Houellebecq

“If you're a kid at a secondary comprehensive in North London as I was in the seventies, prancing around doing acting and being a luvvie wasn't really a good idea for your personal security.”

— Steve McFadden

“I was inspired by the classic rock radio of the Seventies. They separated Chuck Berry and the Beatles from the Led Zeppelins and Bostons and Peter Framptons of the time. In many ways, classic rock became bigger than mainstream rock.”

— Chuck D

“Having a mustache and never smiling became a permanent component of my persona through the quaintly self-important decade of the seventies.”

— John Oates

“It was in the Seventies but I still recall what was a good night for my club. Of course, the stadium has changed now but I have heard that the atmosphere is still the same.”

— Carl Zeiss

“It's funny because unlike back in the seventies when I made hardly any money, today I could just live off the past if I wanted to. I have no interest in that.”

— Mick Rock

“There was much woe and lamentation in the seventies that the game was dying.”

— John Thorn

“All that stuff about heavy metal and hard rock, I don't subscribe to any of that. It's all just music. I mean, the heavy metal from the Seventies sounds nothing like the stuff from the Eighties, and that sounds nothing like the stuff from the Nineties. Who's to say what is and isn't a certain type of music?”

— Ozzy Osbourne

“And except on a certain kind of winter evening-six-thirty in the Seventies, say, already dark and bitter with a wind off the river, when I would be walking very fast toward a bus and would look in the bright windows of brownstones and see cooks working in clean kitchens and and imagine women lighting candles on the floor above and beautiful children being bathed on the floor above that-except on nights like those, I never felt poor; I had the feeling that if I needed money I could always get it.”

— Joan Didion

“In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.”

— Jerry Saltz

“There was a lot of terrible, terrible comedy in the seventies along with 'Fawlty Towers.' It's easy to forget.”

— Robert Webb

“Italy in the Seventies seems like a fascinating place.”

— Rachel Kushner

“The Seventies seemed like this really open time. There were a lot of strong women characters deciding what kind of artists they wanted to be.”

— Rachel Kushner

“How did all that revolutionary talk of the seventies land us in a place where being female means playing dumb and looking good?”

— Claire Messud

“The Seventies were just an interesting time for us because we were building the brand of the name but also varying the style of the music on each of the albums we did. Very creative time of us.”

— Chris Squire

“I loved the seventies.”

— Diane Von Furstenberg

“It made me think of the nice old Marimekko-clad ladies I sometimes went to see in the Ritz Tower: gravel-voiced, turban-wearing, panther-braceleted widows looking to move to Miami, their apartments filled with smoked-glass and chromed-steel furniture that, in the seventies, they'd purchased through their decorators for the price of a good Queen Anne
but (I was responsible for telling them, reluctantly) had not held its value and could not be re-sold at even half what they'd bought it for.”

— Donna Tartt

“When I moved to Sheffield and went to a secondary modern in the Seventies, there were certain challenges: if you've got a name like Sebastian, you either learn to fight or to run.”

— Sebastian Coe

“I'm pro-forwards. Do I want the Seventies to come back? No. The haircuts were terrible. Everyone stank. The food was awful.”

— Douglas Coupland

“If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties
or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.”

— Julian Barnes

“No one is calling any of these designers racist. The act itself is racist. There were more black models working in the Seventies than there are in 2013. This a time when silence is not acceptable at all. If the conversation cannot be had publicly in our industry, then there is something inherently wrong.”

— Iman Abdulmajid

“It's apparent that we can't proceed any further without a name for this institutionalized garrulousness, this psychological patter, this need to catalogue the ego's condition. Let's call it psychobabble, this spirit which now tyrannizes conversation in the seventies.”

— Richard Rosen

“I think that in any argument about right or wrong in football, a reference to Don Revie's Leeds United is the nuclear option. There is, quite simply, nowhere to go after that. There has never been a more horrible football team. The Leeds of the Seventies were found guilty, week in, week out, of crimes against humanity.”

— Giles Smith

“I think there's an audience for The Wombles at almost all levels. We thought it was going to be confined to people in their late twenties, early thirties, who remembered it from before - they were maybe 10 or 12 in the Seventies when it was happening.”

— Mike Batt

“I've got a feeling I'm leaving stardom behind, you know. I'm gradually becoming more of a filmmaker, acquiring a different kind of dignity from that which you achieve in acting. After all, I'm no matinee idol, and I'm getting older. I don't think I can be doing my kind of thing in the seventies; I want to be on more of the creative side of business.”

— Steve McQueen

“Looking at everything, I started to feel nauseous, as if the seventies had taken refuge here against extinction and were preparing to take over the world.”

— Kim Harrison

“I grew up in the seventies and disco was big. That influenced me the most.”

— Ice Cube

“For a long time, the scientists have been telling us global warming increases the temperature of the top layer in the ocean, and that causes the average hurricane to become a lot stronger. So, the fact that the ocean temperatures did go up because of global warming, because of man-made global warming, starting around in the seventies and then we had a string of unusually strong hurricanes outside the boundaries of this multi-decadal cycle that is a real factor; there are scientists who point that out, and they're right, but we're exceeding those boundaries now.”

— Al Gore

“We didn't have rehab back in the Seventies. Back in the Seventies, rehab meant you stopped doing coke, but you kept smoking pot and drinking for a couple more weeks.”

— Denis Leary

“I wish I could have hung out with Patti Smith in the seventies, and also have some crazy times.”

— Ellie Goulding

“Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, you know, poor people, or working people ... Actually, the peak of marijuana use was as I said, in the seventies, but that was rich kids, so you don't throw them in jail. And then it got seriously criminalized, you know, you really throw people in jail for it, when it was poor people.”

— Noam Chomsky

“Development can indeed continue beyond childhood and youth, beyond the seventies. It can continue until the very end of life, given purposes that challenge and use our human abilities ... In sum, our development does not necessarily end at any age. We can continue to develop into our eighties, even to our nineties.”

— Betty Friedan

“All music is rehash. There are only a few notes. Just variations on a theme. Try to tell the kids in the Seventies who were screaming to the Bee Gees that their music was just The Beatles redone. There is nothing wrong with the Bee Gees.”

— John Lennon

“Every time I meet the CEO of a record label I tell them how they did it in the seventies because they want to know. I tell them, "Sign a hundred people! Throw it against the wall and see which ones stick!" And they frown and say, "Oh, we can't do that!" and they start mumbling about demographics and this and that.”

— Tony Visconti

“One of the most original and poetic works of cinema made anywhere in the seventies.”

— Werner Herzog

“I stick to playing Brahms, but I love listening to Led Zeppelin, and I've also been a big fan of Earth Wind and Fire since the Seventies and of The Gap Band since the Eighties.”

— Condoleezza Rice

“People think I'm unusual but it's just that we haven't had anyone like this since the Seventies.”

— Lady Gaga