1970s

The 1970s (pronounced "nineteen-seventies"; shortened to "the '70s") was a decade of the Gregorian calendar that began on 1 January 1970, and ended on 31 December 1979.

Quotes

• Then came the seventies, and the major new musical trends were (1) disco, which consisted of one single song approximately 14,000 minutes long; and (2) heavy metal, which consisted of skinny, hostile, pockmarked men wearing outfits that looked as though they had smeared toxic waste on their bodies, playing what sounded like amplified jackhammers and shrieking unintelligibly at auditoriums full of whooping, sweating, hyperactive, boot-wearing, tattooed people who indicated their approval by giving each other head injuries with chairs. We old-time rock 'n' rollers looked at this scene, and we said, "Nah." We were sure it would pass. So we played our Buffalo Springfield albums and our Motown dance tapes, and we waited for the day when good music, hip music, would become popular again.
  • Dave Barry, Dave Barry Turns 40 (1990). New York: Crown Publishers, p. 58
• The symptoms of this crisis of the American spirit are all around us. For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next five years will be worse than the past five years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world. As you know, there is a growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions. This is not a message of happiness or reassurance, but it is the truth and it is a warning. These changes did not happen overnight. They’ve come upon us gradually over the last generation, years that were filled with shocks and tragedy. We were sure that ours was a nation of the ballot, not the bullet, until the murders of John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. We were taught that our armies were always invincible and our causes were always just, only to suffer the agony of Vietnam. We respected the Presidency as a place of honor until the shock of Watergate. We remember when the phrase “sound as a dollar” was an expression of absolute dependability, until ten years of inflation began to shrink our dollar and our savings. We believed that our nation’s resources were limitless until 1973 when we had to face a growing dependence on foreign oil. These wounds are still very deep. They have never been healed.
  • Jimmy Carter, "A Crisis of Confidence" speech

• the free-lovin'
  seventies, when reading and travels
  opened our imagination
  • Ana Castillo I Ask The Impossible (2000)

• The VCR and the DVD; there was none of that crap back in 1970. We didn't know about a World Wide Web; it was a whole different game playing back when I was a kid.
  • Everclear, "AM Radio", Songs from an American Movie Vol. One: Learning How to Smile (11 July 2000), California: Capitol Records

External links

• Encyclopedic article on 1970s on Wikipedia