John Cooper Clarke Quotes

The second half of the twentieth century is a complete flop.

The '80s was a really creative and brave period. Remember, it was a period of ultraconservatism, and so you needed brave people to push ahead like that.

I remember the '80s being about the Cold War and Reagan and the homeless problem and AIDS. To me, it was kind of a dark, depressing time.

You're not a baby boomer if you don't have a visceral recollection of a Kennedy and a King assassination, a Beatles breakup, a U.S. defeat in Vietnam, and a Watergate.

I was born in March 1949, a post war baby boomer.

By the end of the 1970s Britain was in a mess.

In '74 it was really a very gloomy atmosphere, I would say, to put it mildly.

There's also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.

After World War II society had to settle back for a moment before it picked up the 20th century.

But it is possible that, in the days ahead, these years we have lived through may eventually be thought of simply as a period of disturbance and regression.

If you were born in Britain after World War II, you see a continuous atmosphere of decline, moral and economic and political.

We stand today at the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960's.

The '70s just seemed dirty, honestly, and not in an interesting way. It's not the '80s. In fact, it's 10 less. I grew up in the '80s, so that's more of an interesting time to me.

The first time that I went to the United States was in 1974. I was 20 years old. America was in crisis.

When Reagan left office, he was the most unpopular living president, apart from Nixon, even below Carter. If you look at his years in office, he was not particularly popular. He was more or less average. He severely harmed the American economy.

There is nothing that sets a nation back as far in civilization as prosperity.

Slavery is no scholar, no improver; it does not love the whistle of the railroad; it does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks; it does not increase the white population; it does not improve the soil; everything goes to decay.

Sedentary culture is the goal of civilization. It means the end of its lifespan and brings about its corruption.

You've heard of mental depression; this is a mental recession.

The economic crisis has weakened the EU for years.

Television turned out to be exactly as bad as the most irritating and pedantic intellectuals of the '50s said it was going to be.

There was a transition going on - Baghdad being the intellectual capital of the world where major advances were made in agriculture and mathematics and engineering and medicine and astronomy, and then that all sort of collapsed. And I was trying to understand how such a intellectually fertile environment can lose its compass bearing. Because I think about the creative centers today - countries, or even regions. Will Silicon Valley always be as innovative? Will the United States be innovative, or will we become complacent?

Fear and hatred are the legacy of Ronald Reagan. America's vision of peace and freedom [is being] blasted by the guns of the U.S. Navy in Lebanon, the guns of U.S. paratroopers in Grenada, and the guns of U.S. helicopters in Honduras and El Salvador.

[Bill] Clinton's voice, his manner of speaking and his terminology, "Back in those days... Yeah, back those days... You know, we didn't have the internet back then." My grandfather said, "Back in those days, we didn't have automobiles".

It was the time of the Cold War and so there were was a lot of pressure on the - to get going and the Russians were claiming that they were - Soviets were claiming they were ahead of us in technology. And so it was against that backdrop that the early space flights took off.