2000s Quotes

“The Labour party on the whole has not been a very effective opposition since the election, partly because it spent months and months electing its new leader. I think the Labour party should, for one thing, stress much more that for most people in the past 13 years, the period was not one of collapse into chaos but actually one where the situation improved, and particularly in areas such as schools, hospitals and a variety of other cultural achievements—so the idea that somehow or other it all needs to be taken down and ground into the dust is not valid. I think we need to defend what most people think basically needs defending and that is the provision of some form of welfare from the cradle to the grave.”
― Eric Hobsbawm

“I was often fatigued by the city, its bad breath belching through vents in the pavement, a guy testing his cell phone ringtones on a packed subway.”
― Lisa Ko, The Leavers

“The lack of distinction between the real and the virtual is the obsession of our age. Everything in our current affairs attests to this, not to mention the big cinematic productions: The Truman Show, Total Recall, Existenz, Matrix, etc.
This question has always been there behind literature and philosophy, but it has been present metaphorically, as it were, implicitly, through the filter of discourse. The 'encoding/decoding' of reality was done by discourse, that is to say, by a highly complex medium, never leaving room for a head-on truth.
The encoding/decoding of our reality is done by technology. Only what is produced by this technical effect acquires visible reality. And it does so at the cost of a simplification that no longer has anything to do with language or with the slightest ambivalence and which, therefore, puts an end to this subtle lack of distinction between the real and the virtual, as subtle as the lack of distinction between good and evil. Through special effects, everything acquires an operational self-evidence, a spectacular reality that is, properly speaking, the reign of simulation. What the directors of these films have not realized (any more than the simulationist artists of New York in the eighties) is that simulation is a hypothesis, a game that turns reality itself into one eventuality among others.”
― Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories V: 2000 - 2004

“Back in the early 2000s you were called a freak, loser, virgin, nerd or weirdo by women for using the internet. Now look at them.”
― stained hanes, 94,000 Wasps in a Trench Coat

“The difference between her and her sister could be attributed to the fact that she came of age in the nineties, during the heyday of plaid and heroin, while her sister came of age in the 2000s, during the heyday of thongs and cocaine. That was when everything got a little chihuahua and started starring in its own show. That was when we saw the whole world’s waxed pussy getting out of a car, and said, more.”
― Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

“Oh mall... at least you're always here for me”
― Kate Leth, Mall Goth

“Having Nostalgia is romantic. It's the ability to Never forget something you love”
― Erin La Rosa, The Backtrack