The definition of vintage is something that is at least 20 years old. Vintage anything is in style, prized, and sought after, especially in fashion, music, and any other art form. Millennials rock old Zeppelin records because the sound is so much purer.
They buy “one of a kind” fashion statement pieces from Good Will or any ragged out thrift shop they can find in order to be different and unique, or just to celebrate another time they didn’t have the opportunity to live in. Tangible items such as fashion and clothes are a good way to note an era and revel in or appreciate that era with wearable nostalgia. And old music is just a damn good thing. But, what about what these people from our past said?
What about their ideas, beliefs, concepts, texts, poems, etc. There is much more from our past that we should be digging up. With the recent production of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and several other shows and movies that reproduce or highlight a text or time from the past, media is grabbing hold of our vintage art, vintage books, and vintage ideas and bringing them to light. As Atwood would write herself, “there is nothing new under the sun”.
It is important to look at vintage or antique ideas in a way that bolsters them to their time of being written, but it is also important to correlate these older, already said ideas and apply them to the present. Here are some vintage quotes every millennial (or babyboomer, or generation x,y,z and all those in between) should read in order to see that our past political climates are very much our present. All of these quotes are vintage in that they are at least 20 years old…but their relevance to all aspects of life is uncanny:
1. “Ignoring isn’t the same as ignorance. You have to work at it.” –Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale
2. “Sweet, crazy conversations full of half sentences, daydreams, and misunderstandings [are] more thrilling than understanding ever could be.”- Toni Morrison, Beloved
3. “Lonely, ain’t it?”
“Yes, by my lonely is mine. Now your lonely is somebody else’s. Made somebody else and handed to you. Ain’t that something? A secondhand lonely.”- Toni Morrison, Sula
4. “One has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.”- MLK
5. “The government itself which is only the mode which the people have chosen to execute their will is equally liable to be abused and perverted before the people can act through it,”-Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government
6. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right.”- Henry David Thoreau, Resistance to Civil Government
7.“I tire so of hearing people say, ‘let things take their course. Tomorrow is another day’. I do not need my freedom when I am dead. I cannot live on tomorrow’s bread.” –Langston Hughes
8. “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.” Ralph Waldo Emerson
9.“There are few things in the world as dangerous as sleepwalkers.” Ralph Waldo Ellison
10. “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”- Albert Camus
11. “Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.”- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
12. "A good snapshot stops a moment from running away." -Eudora Welty
13. "Faith and doubt both are needed- not as antagonists, but working side by side to take us around the unknown curve." -Lillian Smith
14. "The artist must bow to the monster of his own imagination." -Richard Wright
15. "Men can starve from a lack of self-realization as much as they can from a lack of bread." -Richard Wright
16. "Political language...is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind." -George Orwell
17. "The world is mud-luscious and puddle-wonderful." -E.E. Cummings
18. "One need not be a chamber to be haunted; One need not be a house; The brain has corridors surpassing material place." -Emily Dickinson
19. "Re-examine all that you have been told...dismiss that which insults your soul." -Walt Whitman
20. "You're not to be so blind with patriotism that you can't face reality. Wrong is wrong, no matter who does it or says it." -Malcom X