1981 · Skopia

Showing 31 quotes from 1981

First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan · 1981

★ 7.1

There is only one question which really matters: why do bad things happen to good people?

When Bad Things Happen to Good People · 1981

★ 6.0

The power of money is a distinctly male power. Money speaks, but it speaks with a male voice. In the hands of women, money stays literal; count it out, it buys what it is worth or less. In the hands of men, money buys women, sex, status, dignity, esteem, recognition, loyalty, all manner of possibility.

Andrea Dworkin

Pornography: Men Possessing Women · 1981

★ 5.2

Essay

Original thought is like original sin: both happened before you were born to people you could not possibly have met.

Fran Lebowitz

1981

★ 5.2

Film · Action (film) · Adventure (film) · Action · Adventure

It's not the years, honey, it's the mileage.

Indiana Jones

Raiders of the Lost Ark · 1981

★ 4.8

Essay

Remember that as a teenager you are at the last stage in your life when you will be happy to hear that the phone is for you.

Fran Lebowitz

Tips for Teens · 1981

★ 4.4

Novel

Most of what matters in our lives takes place in our absence.

Salman Rushdie

Midnight's Children · 1981

★ 3.9

Speech · Political speech

No arsenal or no weapon in the arsenals of the world is so formidable as the will and moral courage of free men and women.

Ronald Reagan

First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan · 1981

★ 3.8

Speech · Political speech

We're too great a nation to limit ourselves to small dreams. We're not, as some would have us believe, doomed to an inevitable decline.

Ronald Reagan

First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan · 1981

★ 3.7

Speech · Political speech

We are a nation that has a government—not the other way around. And this makes us special among the nations of the Earth. Our government has no power except that granted it by the people. It is time to check and reverse the growth of government, which shows signs of having grown beyond the consent of the governed.

Ronald Reagan

First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan · 1981

★ 3.7

Congressional hearing

Smoking... Kills you, and if you are killed, you have lost a very important part of your life.

Brooke Shields

1981

★ 3.6

You can't be serious!

John McEnroe

1981

★ 3.6

Magazine

A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.

Italo Calvino

1981

★ 3.5

Interview

The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your senses for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. There can’t be any large scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.

Jim Morrison

1981

★ 3.5

Film · Sports (film) · Historical drama (film) · Sports · Historical drama

Jenny, I believe God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast and when I run I feel His pleasure.

Eric Liddell

Chariots of Fire · 1981

★ 3.5

On the geologic time scale, a human lifetime is reduced to a brevity that is too inhibiting to think about. The mind blocks the information.

John McPhee

1981

★ 3.5

Poem

Though I have not been here long, I can look up at the sky at night and tell how things are likely to go for the next hundred million years: the universe will probably not find a way to vanish nor I in all that time reappear.

A.R. Ammons

Rapids · 1981

★ 3.4

Speech · Political speech

Those who say that we're in a time when there are not heroes, they just don't know where to look.

Ronald Reagan

First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan · 1981

★ 2.1

Speech · Political speech

It's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work—work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.

Ronald Reagan

First Inaugural Address of Ronald Reagan · 1981

★ 2.0

Feminist literature

Women do not believe that men believe what pornography says about women. But they do. From the worst to the best of them, they do.

Andrea Dworkin

1981

★ 1.9

Film · Action (film) · Adventure (film) · Action · Adventure

You Americans, you're all the same. Always overdressing for the wrong occasions.

Toht

Raiders of the Lost Ark · 1981

★ 1.9

Neon looks good in Nevada.

John McPhee

1981

★ 1.9

Newspaper

The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is being treated either as Madonnas or Mary Magdalenes.

Shirley Williams

1981

★ 1.9

Interview

When things are very very bad, a drink is the only magic cheap thing left to give you the dream, to make you feel good for a moment.

Charles Bukowski

1981

★ 1.9

Film · Sports (film) · Historical drama (film) · Sports · Historical drama

Everyone runs in her own way, or his own way and where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within.

Eric Liddell

Chariots of Fire · 1981

★ 1.9

Play · Comedy (play)

No matter how lonely you get or how many birth announcements you receive, the trick is not to get frightened. There's nothing wrong with being alone.

Wendy Wasserstein

1981

★ 1.8

Slowly the reality of it all formed in my mind: we were expendable! It was difficult to accept. We come from a nature and a culture that values life and the individual. To find oneself in a situation where your life seems of little value is the ultimate in loneliness. It is a humbling experience.

E.B. Sledge

1981

★ 1.7

You cannot be a success in any business without believing that it is the greatest business in the world... You have to put your heart in the business and the business in your heart.

Thomas Watson

1981

★ 1.7

Interview · Magazine

I don't wait to be struck by lightning and don't need certain slants of light in order to write.

Toni Morrison

1981

★ 1.3

Film · Action (film) · Adventure (film) · Action · Adventure

An army that carries the ark before it, is invincible.

Marcus Brody

Raiders of the Lost Ark · 1981

★ 1.2

Essay

Students of the heavens are separable into astronomers and astrologers as readily as are the minor domestic ruminants into sheep and goats, but the separation of philosophers into sages and cranks seems to be more sensitive to frames of reference.

W.V.O. Quine

1981

★ 0.8