Quotes About Change

The video for 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' was not more consequential than the reunification of Germany. But Nevermind is the inflection point where one style of Western culture ends and another begins, mostly for reasons only vaguely related to music.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us.

Modern people hate American Beauty for the same reason people in 1999 loved American Beauty: It examines the interior problems of upper-middle-class white people living in the late twentieth century—the kind of people who voted for Bill Clinton twice and (perhaps) saw fragments of their own lives within the problems he created for himself. And it was, in all probability, the last time in history such problems would be considered worthy of contemplation.

Football allows the intellectual part of my brain to evolve, but it allows the emotional part to remain unchanged. It has a liberal cerebellum and a reactionary heart. And this is all I want from everything, all the time, always.

This is a consistent theme in stories about traveling to the future: Things are always worse when you get there. And I suspect this is because the kind of writer who's intrigued by the notion of moving forward in time can't see beyond their own pessimism about being alive. People who want to travel through time are both (a) unhappy and (b) unwilling to compromise anything about who they are. They would rather change every element of society except themselves.

Now the 1990s seem like a period when the world was starting to go crazy, but not so crazy that it was unmanageable or irreparable. It was the end of the twentieth century, but also the end to an age when we controlled technology more than technology controlled us. People played by the old rules, despite a growing recognition that those rules were flawed. It was a good time that happened long ago, although not nearly as long ago as it seems.

The 1980 George W. S. Trow essay "Within the Context of No Context" argued that "the work of television is to establish false contexts and to chronicle the unraveling of existing contexts.

Y2K was the maturation of a criticism whose echo would become normative and unyielding: We've lost control of what we have built, and we need to go back. But the road at our heels was already gone. Forward was the only way out.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.

the slow cancellation of the future and the fast homogenization of the past]

The first moment someone calls for a revolution is usually the last moment I take them seriously.

Pessimists thought this shutdown would kill baseball entirely. It did not. But it does represent the point where baseball's past became more desirable than baseball's future, an inversion that would never really reverse itself.

And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the statue quo is temporary.

I always thought the time machine is the device that's missed most. Without even saying it out loud, that's the thing people want the most: The ability to take whatever it is that went wrong and fix it.

But I've mellowed over time, which is what all wine drunks and dope smokers say when trying to justify why they quit trying.

It's impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow.

Every visual reflects the same statement: The hedonistic, euphoric, high-gloss 1980s are over. It took five minutes to killdoze an entire decade.

The future is always impossible.

It sometimes seems like 1995 was the year the future began. This is particularly true if the last book you happened to read was W. Joseph Campbell's 1995: The Year the Future Began.

accelerated culture does not respond well to the nonobvious.

flaws that didn't seem unacceptable until they were already eradicated.

Normal consumers declare rock to be dead whenever they personally stop listening to it (or at least to new iterations of it), which typically happens about two years after they graduate from college.

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional.

Well, that's how it always seems, until it doesn't.