The Nineties Quotes
"Decades are about cultural perception, and culture can’t read a clock."
"There’s always a disconnect between the world we seem to remember and the world that actually was."
"It was perhaps the last period in American history when personal and political engagement was still viewed as optional."
"The worst thing you could be was a sellout, and not because selling out involved money."
"The enforced ennui and alienation of Gen X had one social upside: Self-righteous outrage was not considered cool."
"If you weren’t happy, the preferred stance was to simply shrug and accept that you were unhappy."
"It’s hard to explain the soft differences between life in the 2020s and life in the 1990s."
"We had grown up admiring punk bands and thinking all those groups on the pop charts were embarrassing."
"It was insane to take selling out seriously, yet still unforgivable to actually sell out."
"The way the world was presented through media was increasingly detached from the way the world actually was."
"The timing for George Bush was strategically perfect—the Soviet collapse and Germany’s reunification both occurred while he was in office."
"Something indefinable was changing about the way people processed history."
"The Gulf War was a successful war, assuming you’re willing to classify anything that kills tens of thousands of people as a success."
"The Gulf War was seen and unseen at the same time."
"There’s a belief in America that a third-party candidate can’t become president, and Perot is both the refutation and the proof."
"For George Bush, the Gulf War did not happen."
"Technology was advancing faster than the human condition."
"Our president was sending delegations over to burp and diaper and pamper Saddam Hussein and tell him how nice he was."
"The only way to understand how little this victory informed George Bush’s political future."
"No movie or director influenced nineties film culture as much as the advent and everywhereness of the video store."
"Prior to the VCR, it was difficult for average people to develop a personal, intimate relationship with non-obvious filmmaking."
"The immediate popularity of movie rentals was not surprising to anyone."
"For a movie fanatic living in a small town, the experience of reading Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide was more mind-expanding than spending twelve months trying to see every movie within driving distance."
"It was now possible to peruse a shelf with dozens of subtitled foreign films in communities where a foreign-language film had never previously screened, ever."
"Renting fostered a culture of aesthetic diversity, to the point of pure randomness."
"The most common way to select a movie was to aimlessly meander around the video store, glance at the covers of various boxes, read the cursory plot descriptions on the back of those boxes, and select the most appealing option that happened to be available."
"Video stores invented a new kind of independent director that became so pervasive it instantly became a caricature."
"The video store was the beginning of everything. It was the cradle of civilization."
"The internet turned every computer into an object that was almost (but not entirely) unimaginable in 1972: a television you could talk to, and a television that would listen."
"Once consumers experienced free music, they came to view music as something that was supposed to be free."
"The free democratizing of songs eliminated the experience of categorizing music as a reflection of who the listener was."
"What’s so disorienting about the internet of the 1990s is the paradox of its centrality: It was the most important thing that happened, but its importance is still overrated."
"There’s almost nothing easier to research than the growth of the internet."
"Small businesses needed a fax machine more than they needed an online connection."
"The internet was an amorphous concept constantly described as encroaching, yet always two years away."
"The internet was coming. When was it coming? Soon."
"Facebook didn’t start until 2004. Twitter wasn’t founded until 2006."
"The pervasiveness of the industrial system pushes people toward artificial goals and irrational pursuits."
"It was confusing. An author like Eggers wrote about grim human experiences with total vulnerability."
"To those who saw ironic distance as a creeping cultural affliction, there was no creative crisis more damaging."
"Emotional uninvestment made so many contradictions fun and enriching."
"Shouldn’t the best things in life also be the most important things?"
"The solution was to be less cynical, and one way to be less cynical was to elevate the expression of sincerity."
"Every time period that’s ever transpired has seemed unprecedented to the people who happened to live through it."
"Capitalism is connected to every extension of American life, so it can be cited as the source for almost any social ill."
"A hatred of capitalism is consciously pessimistic."
"The notion of intrinsic merit is superfluous, since the only quality capitalism values is the perpetuation of itself."
"What’s revelatory are the values that hugeness expressed, on purpose or by chance."
"A genius is the one most like himself."
"There is a difference between reputation and character."
"I detest selfishness, but see it in the mirror every day."
"The key to understanding Morris—his hold on the President and his success at helping Clinton assert himself—is that he was not bound to what passed for reality in Washington."
"The importance of television throughout the nineties was easy to feel but hard to explain."
"People watch cable news as a form of entertainment, and they don’t want to learn anything that contradicts what they already believe."
"The past is not merely a foreign country. The past is an alternative cosmos."
"What began as a new form of intellectual authority, rooted in a devoutly apolitical worldview, nudged easily into an ultra-reactionary politics."
"Clinton was the last transcendent political figure of an era no one realized was ending."
"I am a living paradox—deeply religious yet not as convinced of my exact beliefs as I ought to be; wanting responsibility yet shirking it; loving the truth but often times giving way to falsity."
"I think the key to understanding Morris—his hold on the President and his success at helping Clinton assert himself—is that he was not bound to what passed for reality in Washington."
"Everyone knew the basic principle, but almost no one seemed to grasp how that principle translated into process."
"The smallest possible detail, overlooked by technologists unaware of their godlike power, would instantaneously return a futuristic society to the Stone Age."
"The majority of people never truly believed this would happen."
"You never get credit for the disasters you avert."
"The millennium bug was real, and the internationally coordinated effort was a great success."
"Y2K came and went, and nothing changed at all."
"Our psychedelic future had been reached, but it was merely an updated version of the previous present."
"The infiltration of technology was so immersive that two misplaced digits on a computer chip could supposedly alter everything else."
"We’ve lost control of what we have built, and we need to go back. But the road at our heels was already gone."
"It was the beginning of absolutist binary thinking on every issue even vaguely related to politics, based on the assumption that any attempt at real compromise was either hopeless or fake."
"Coolness is a private language for those who long for more."
"Nostalgia is a weapon for those who remember and a shield for those who forget."
"The Internet was the true democratization of information, but at a cost we are still trying to understand."
"Music was a battleground, where ideologies clashed with guitars and samplers as their weapons."
"In the digital age, privacy became a quaint relic of a bygone era."
"The nineties were a decade of paradoxes, where global awareness expanded even as personal identities fragmented."
"Technology promised to connect us but ended up dividing us in ways we could not have anticipated."
"The pursuit of authenticity often led to its own kind of artificiality."
"In a world where everyone could broadcast their own reality, truth became the first casualty."