50s Quotes

1. "By the '40s, Sam Goldwyn is a very serious man. By the '50s, he's the dean of American producers. To the end, he was Hollywood's gray eminence."
Author: A. Scott Berg

2. "Anyone who's got a guitar, you like to pick it up. I can play a couple of songs, some '50s rock and roll, a bit of Elvis. That's it, really - I'm not a musician, I'm not a singer."
Author: Aaron Johnson

3. "I like '50s and '60s American art. I have 85 or 90 Warhols."
Author: Aby Rosen

4. "Growing up in the '50s and being in the '60s, in that revolutionary time space, I thought freedom was what I was looking for. Slowly but surely, it became clear that the last thing I was interested in was freedom. Because if you're going to be free, you have to be free from something."
Author: Anthony Braxton

5. "I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world."
Author: Ben Gibbard

6. "I grew up doing all that stuff because I was obsessed with the '50s. I had sock hops for birthday parties. So I've always done The Twist and stuff. It was pretty natural and, with my parents doing it all the time, I'd just copy them. Not very pretty."
Author: Brittany Snow

7. "I can think of a lot of women clients of mine who are well into their 50s or 60s who are still quintessentially very elegant."
Author: Bruce Oldfield

8. "I was a beatnik in the '50s before the hippies came along."
Author: Charles Manson

9. "They say that the best furniture and clothing design from the '50s and '60s is Scandinavian or Milanese."
Author: Christian Lacroix

10. "Here is Mike Wallace, who is visible to the public, and I have been watching him since the early '50s. Smoking up a storm and insulting his guests and being absolutely wonderfully evil and charming too."
Author: Christopher Plummer

11. "Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew."
Author: Christopher Ryan

12. "It is not fashionable anymore, I suppose, to have a regard for one's mother in the way my brother and I had then, in the mid-1950s, when the noise outside the window was mostly wind and sea chime."
Author: Colum McCann

13. "The best thing ever is when some guy in his 50s taps me on the shoulder and says, 'I just want to let you know I hate my job, I hate my wife, and I come home and I watch reruns of your show and it's the only half hour of the day when I laugh and I forget how miserable life is.'"
Author: Danny Masterson

14. "The 1850s proved to be the decade of the most prolific patent litigation in America's history. Lincoln himself was involved, as well as his most three prolific cabinet members: Chase, Seward and Stanton."
Author: Darin Gibby

15. "I had never owned a pair of jeans, and I didn't plan on it. I'm not a cowboy, a farmer, or a 1950s greaser."
Author: David Iserson

16. "If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow."
Author: David Strathairn

17. "When I was 16, I made some little 35mm documentaries about the poor in London. I went round Notting Hill, which was a real slum in the 1950s, shooting film."
Author: David Suchet

18. "Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?"
Author: Douglas Coupland

19. "I like sunny stories. You know, my favorite girls in the '50s were Debbie Reynolds, Doris Day, and Esther Williams."
Author: Edward Herrmann

20. "I'm someone who's done the opposite of whatever the received wisdom is, to keep your career going into your 50s."
Author: Elizabeth McGovern

21. "I fantasised about F. Scott Fitzgerald's 'The Great Gatsby' - I loved it, and then I read everything J. D. Salinger had to offer. Then I was turned on to Kerouac, and his spontaneous prose, his stream of consciousness way of writing. I admired him so much, and I romanticised so much about the '40s and '50s."
Author: Garrett Hedlund

22. "In the 1950s, I proposed the survivor method of determining the efficient sizes of enterprises, and worked on delivered price systems, vertical integration, and similar topics."
Author: George Stigler

23. "There are now grandmothers and grandfathers coming to see us because they are of that age, they grew up in the '50s and '60s and they bring their sons and their daughters to hear the songs they heard when they were young."
Author: George Thorogood

24. "I tried to take seriously the idea that if you tortured language you might arrive at some new truth. Later it became clear to me that I was retreading ground by fighting the literary battles of the 1950s and 1960s, and that I was actually a bit bored by some of the books I professed to love."
Author: Hari Kunzru

25. "Like Semmering Academy, the Grove School was a Gothic pile of bricks run by 1950s-era chalk drones, which maintained its cultural viability by perpetuating a weirdly seductive anxiety throughout its community. Mary herself was a victim of the seduction; despite the trying and repetitive emotional requirements of her job, she remained eternally fascinated by the wicker-thin girls and their wicker-thin mothers, all of them favoring dark wool skirts and macintoshes and unreadably far-away expressions; if she squinted, they could have emerged intact from any of the last seven decades."
Author: Heidi Julavits

26. "Well, the big products in electronics in the '50s were radio and television. The first big computers were just beginning to come in and represented the most logical market for us to work in."
Author: Jack Kilby

27. "It was good to launch the economy in the '50s. Japan did this; China did this; even South Korea did this. All the East Asians did this - import substitution. I think all countries followed import substitution in the '50s and in the '60s, but I think by the '70s, countries were getting out of that first phase of the strategy."
Author: Jairam Ramesh

28. "The Moguls is a story about guys that have all grown up together and are now in their late 40s, early 50s."
Author: Joe Pantoliano

29. "For example, it's only about 20 years ago the people in that community would have got telephone lines, and it would be only about in the 1950s that electricity came to that part of the world. Television wouldn't have come till 1970."
Author: John McGahern

30. "The first amp I had back in the '50s was a small Fender."
Author: Johnny Rivers

31. "I wanted to create clothes for women in their 40s and 50s and 60s who have careers and are sexy and don't want to look like grandmothers."
Author: Joseph Altuzarra

32. "Well, I didn't know how to draw very well back then, in the '40s and '50s."
Author: Lawrence Ferlinghetti

33. "To my surprise, my 70s are nicer than my 60s and my 60s than my 50s, and I wouldn't wish my teens and 20s on my enemies."
Author: Lionel Blue

34. "Not disown my past or upbringing, but I'd admired American actors, really American movie star - particularly the rebel heroes of the '50s."
Author: Maxwell Caulfield

35. "People who don't like me talk about it as though I'm trash because I have tattoos. I find that insane because it's 2008, not the 1950s. Tattoos aren't limited to sailors. It's a form of art I find beautiful. I love it."
Author: Megan Fox

36. "During the 1950s, Aristotle Onassis and I formed what grew to be a close friendship and association in several business ventures."
Author: Paul Getty

37. "A lot of my audience are in their 50s. But they want me to pretend to continue to be pretending."
Author: Pete Townshend

38. "I don't want the technology of the 1950s, but I want the free market of the 1950s."
Author: Peter Schiff

39. "When I came to England, the first director I met was Charles Sturridge, who told me, 'You speak like somebody out of the 1950s.'"
Author: Richard E. Grant

40. "In an agricultural society, or during a time of exploration and settlement, or hunting and fathering--which is to say, most of mankind's history--energetic boys were particularly prized for their strength, speed, and agility. [...] As recently as the 1950s, most families still had some kind of agricultural connection. Many of these children, girls as well as boys, would have been directing their energy and physicality in constructive ways: doing farm chores, baling hay, splashing in the swimming hole, climbing trees, racing to the sandlot for a game of baseball. Their unregimented play would have been steeped in nature."
Author: Richard Louv

41. "Language is changing constantly; printing and modern education have slowed it but have not stopped it. Given all this change, when, exactly, was language PERFECT, in the language pundit's mind? One has the feeling that the decline-mongers would feel rather sheepish has reading any answer. The 1950s? The Edwardian era? The real answer, however rarely expressed, seems to be "when Island it as a young person."
Author: Robert Lane Greene

42. "The 1950s is a key decade in the 20th Century. Each year has a distinctive flavour."
Author: Sara Sheridan

43. "...lung cancer incidence in men increased dramatically in the 1950s as a result of an increase in cigarette smoking during the early twentieth century. In women, a cohort that began to smoke in the 1950s, lung cancer incidence has yet to reach its peak."
Author: Siddhartha Mukherjee

44. "By the '50s and '60s, war movies had become big and impersonal. They almost never bothered to characterize the Japanese enemy as particularly evil; in fact, they never bothered to characterize him at all."
Author: Stephen Hunter

45. "And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s."
Author: Thomas Keneally

46. "Happy Days was about a family... although the show was shot in the 70s, it was about a family in the 50s. I realized that kids were watching their parents grow up and the parents were watching themselves grow up. That was the key to the success of our show."
Author: Tom Bosley

47. "I have a good friend in the East, who comes to my shows and says, you sing a lot about the past, you can't live in the past, you know. I say to him, I can go outside and pick up a rock that's older than the oldest song you know,and bring it back in here and drop it on your foot. Now the past didn't go anywhere, did it? It's right here, right now.I always thought that anybody who told me I couldn't live in the past was trying to get me to forget something that if I remembered it it would get them serious trouble. No, that 50s, 60s, 70s, 90s stuff, that whole idea of decade packaging, things don't happen that way. The Vietnam War heated up in 1965 and ended in 1975-- what's that got to do with decades? No, that packaging of time is a journalist convenience that they use to trivialize and to dismiss important events and important ideas. I defy that."
Author: Utah Phillips

48. "'The Sopranos' wardrobe people would sometimes go over there and just grab stuff off the racks, because B&G has that style that never ages. It's like a '50s or '60s style. It fits me well."
Author: Vincent Pastore

49. "The childhood that Paul and Clara Jobs created for their new son was, in many ways, a stereotype of the late 1950s. When Steve was two they adopted a girl they named Patty, and three years later they moved to a tract house in the suburbs."
Author: Walter Isaacson

50. "Being an actress can be a little like being a girl in the '50s: You're stuck waiting by the phone, hoping that the boy you like will call."
Author: Zooey Deschanel

50s Quotes Pictures