Quotes About 1950s

#1. I've always heard that women secretly want their father. So I used to walk around in a 1950s business suit, with a hat and a pipe. My opening line would be, 'You should be getting to bed now.'

Conan O'Brien

#2. There was a sea of change in comedy in the late 1950s and '60s. We were dealing with vignettes as opposed to jokes. We were more socially aware.

Bob Newhart

#3. And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.

Thomas Keneally

#4. You don't have to conform to a very specific aesthetic today, whereas 1950s women definitely had to.

Romola Garai

#5. In the 1950s, we had all these B-grade science-fiction movies. The point was to scare the public and get them to buy popcorn. No attempt was made to create movies that were somewhat inherent to the truth.

Michio Kaku

#6. Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization.

Timothy Leary

#7. I grew up on Stephen King, reading the books. I love the small town, 1950s feel to it, that nostalgia, and that old America. What happens when something weird starts happening to all these people, something other-worldly, something demonic?

Alexander Koch

#8. In the early 1950s, during the near avalanche of discoveries, rediscoveries, and redefinitions of subcellular components made possible by electron microscopy, those prospecting in this newly opened field were faced with the problem of what to do with their newly acquired wealth.

George Emil Palade

#9. I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time.

Sara Paretsky

#10. In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland.

Kevin Haworth

#11. 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.

Colum McCann

#12. I never wanted to work in fashion. At age 12 or 13, I wanted to design for showgirls - for the theater! And I was crazy for the Hollywood of the 1950s: Dietrich, Elizabeth Taylor, Jennifer Jones. They were my idea of glamour - and Sylvie Vartan, the French singer.

Christian Louboutin

#13. When I get you back, I'm gonna put that necklace back around your neck and pin you. He tries to hold my eyes with his own. 'Like the 1950s.

Jenny Han

#14. Our conception of 1950s underwear is a lovely vintage aesthetic, but actually, wearing stockings with no elastic and a girdle was heavy duty.

Romola Garai

#15. Morris Halle was already working on a generative phonology of Russian in the 1950s, and we also worked together on the generative phonology of English, at first jointly with Fred Lukoff.

Noam Chomsky

#16. 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.

Walter Isaacson

#17. Texas senator and tea party favorite Ted Cruz announced he's running for president. He pledged to lead America boldly forward into the 1950s.

Conan O'Brien

#18. Some of us stay married because we're in competition with our divorcing 1960s and 1970s parents, who made such a hash of it. What looks appealing to us now, in an increasingly frenetic, digital world, is the 1950s marriage.

Sandra Tsing Loh

#19. When I first ventured into the Gulf of Mexico in the 1950s, the sea appeared to be a blue infinity too large, too wild to be harmed by anything that people could do.

Sylvia Earle

#20. I took several trips to New Orleans and met with people who had intimate knowledge of the underbelly of the city in the 1950s. The meetings were both fascinating and terrifying.

Ruta Sepetys

#21. Yes, Manila had its slums; one saw them on the drive from the airport: vast districts of men in dirty white undershirts lounging idly in front of auto-repair shops - like a poorer version of the 1950s America depicted in such films as Grease.

Mohsin Hamid

#22. Is there anything sadder than the foods of the 1950s? Canned, frozen, packaged concoctions, served up by the plateful, three meals per day, in an era in which the supermarket was king, the farmer's market was, well, for farmers, and the word 'locavore' sounded vaguely like a mythical beast.

Jeffrey Kluger

#23. When I came to England, the first director I met was Charles Sturridge, who told me, 'You speak like somebody out of the 1950s.'

Richard E. Grant

#24. We had a cistern for water. My grandmother churned butter and made lye soap. She and my mother did the washing in a wash kettle outdoors, using a fire to heat the water. That's the way they did the wash until the 1950s.

Bobbie Ann Mason

#25. The idea of a tax on the ownership of a television belongs in the 1950s. Why not tax people for owning a washing machine to fund the manufacture of Persil?

Jeremy Paxman

#26. After all, she knows how painful it can be not to follow your heart and she knows about the obstacles and about loyalty and duty and about the countless kinds of love. If only Eve and Myles were freer to make the right choices, she thinks.

Claire Dyer

#27. The idea of doing a production of 'Carousel' that doesn't feel like it's stuck in the 1950s really intrigues me.

Aaron Lazar

#28. This is the conundrum of the present regimes in the Arab world. They still want to control youth; they want to be in control as they did in the 1950s and '60s. But that doesn't work anymore. Now with just a Wi-Fi link, you can understand what's happening in the world.

Bassem Youssef

#29. I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives.

Betty Friedan

#30. Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.

Nancy Gibbs

#31. 'Minute to Win It' is a variation on a game show from the 1950s called 'Beat the Clock,' in which contestants won washing machines and fox stoles by doing such pointless stunts as catching a tennis ball in a paper cup or knocking a hat off one's wife's head with a whipped-cream spritzer.

Tom Shales

#32. Crib death was so infrequent in the pre-vaccination era that it was not even mentioned in the statistics, but it started to climb in the 1950s with the spread of mass vaccination against diseases of childhood.

Harris L Coulter

#33. The country is like a great sponge - it finally absorbs you. Eventually you will get malaria or you will get dysentery and whatever you do, if you don't keep doing it, the jungle will grow over you. Black or white, you've got to fight it every minute of the day.

Katharine Hepburn

#34. The activities that went on at Camp King between 1946 and the late 1950s have never been fully accounted for by either the Department of Defense or the CIA.

Annie Jacobsen

#35. People have this idea that nature dictates a sort of 1950s sitcom version of what males and females are like. That is just not the case in the insect world.

Marlene Zuk

#36. When I was a boy in the late 1950s, the public library refused to stock books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. They were regarded as vulgar, ill-written potboilers.

Michael Dirda

#37. Screw going home. This wasn't the 1950s.

Jennifer L. Armentrout

#38. I grew up in austerity in the 1940s and 1950s.

David Hockney

#39. I'm a big fan of the young 1950s Elvis when he would just go onstage and control the whole environment.

Bruno Mars

#40. New developments in weapon systems during the 1950s and early 1960s created a situation that was most dangerous, and even conducive to accidental war.

Herman Kahn

#41. The American work environment has to change, not the women. We should be recognizing that what women are not fitting into is a very narrow, male-dominated workplace of the 1950s.

Anne-Marie Slaughter

#42. By the end of the 1950s, American cars were so reliable that their reliability went without saying even in car ads. Thousands of them bear testimony to this today, still running on the roads of Cuba though fueled with nationalized Venezuelan gasoline and maintained with spit and haywire.

P. J. O'Rourke

#43. I grew up in the 1950s and '60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.

Al Sharpton

#44. I'm more a 1950s hourglass shape.

Sarah Hay

#45. It is an impressive place that smells like the 1950s, when everyone wore starch white shirts and black slacks and perfect crewcuts and worked on massive industrial projects

Elf Sternberg

#46. Housewives of the 1950s were supposed to create show-stopping meals every night for their hard-working husbands.

Caroline Leavitt

#47. I went to watch my father at Silverstone in the early 1950s, and I've still got the car he was in.

Nick Mason

#48. When the first fossils began to be found in eastern Africa, in the late 1950s, I thought, what a wonderful marriage this was, biology and anthropology. I was around 16 years old when I made this particular choice of academic pursuit.

Donald Johanson

#49. When I was a boy in Salem, Mass., in the 1950s, if you wanted to buy a book, you had to take a train to Boston. And when you got there, to a bookstore, there was no such thing as a science-fiction section.

Gardner Dozois

#50. You wanted to live inside the lines where the ordinariness of everything would protect you from the dragons that lay at the edge of the map ready to blow fire in your face if you strayed off course, to the edge of the known world.

Anne Roiphe

#51. As a young Marxist in college during the 1950s heyday of the anti-Communist crusade led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, I had more freedom to express my views in class, without fear of retaliation, than conservative students have on many campuses today.

Thomas Sowell

#52. In the mid-1950s, when I was in medical school, there seemed to be an unbridgeable gap between our neurophysiology and the actualities of how patients experienced neurological disorders.

Oliver Sacks

#53. The World Health Organization found that Americans live in the richest country, but they are also the most anxious.2 The average high school kid today experiences the same level of anxiety as the average psychiatric patient of the 1950s.

Brigid Schulte

#54. During the 1950s, Aristotle Onassis and I formed what grew to be a close friendship and association in several business ventures.

J. Paul Getty

#55. This separation was absolute in our original Republic. But the sky-godders do not give up easily. In the 1950s they actually got the phrase In God We Trust onto the currency, in direct violation of the First Amendment.

Gore Vidal

#56. There's a word the teabaggers have wanted to use since Obama came on the scene, but they can't because it's not the 1950s. They would love to say this word. It begins with an N and ends with -er, and it's not nation-builder.

Bill Maher

#57. The period that I would anoint as the golden era in American journalism was from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. It had three separate major strands: the Civil Rights struggle over integration of schools and public facilities in the South; the Vietnam War; and Watergate.

Anonymous

#58. I feel like I've been watching Irwin Corey forever. I saw him in the 1950s, and I thought he was old then.

Dick Cavett

#59. If you were a kid in the 1950s, and you got nightmares from a story in a horror comic book, you have Al Feldstein to blame. If you were a kid in the '60s or '70s, giggling at 'MAD's prankster wit, you have Feldstein to thank.

Richard Corliss

#60. The United Nations was founded 70 years ago, at the end of World War II. Since that time, Japan has steadfastly walked the path of peace and rebuilt a nation. And, since the mid-1950s onward, we have actively worked to share our experience of development with other nations, especially in Asia.

Shinzo Abe

#61. We have been around in the States in the ski wear market since the 1950s, but now we feel we can compete in the sportswear field.

Willy Bogner Jr.

#62. The whole 1960s thing was a ten-year running party, which was lovely. It started at the end of the 1950s and sort of faded a bit when it became muddled with flower power. It was marvelous.

Mary Quant

#63. What the United States wanted in Guatemala - and in Iran, where the C.I.A. also deposed a government in the early 1950s - was pro-American stability.

Stephen Kinzer

#64. Sarah Vaughan was the Charlie Parker of the vocalists during the 1950s.

Roy Haynes

#65. The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past.

Stephanie Coontz

#66. John Gurdon spent around fifteen years, starting in the late 1950s, demonstrating that in fact nuclei from specialised cells are able to create whole animals if placed in the right environment i.e. an unfertilised egg

Nessa Carey

#67. there are deep stubborn veins of nostalgia for the 1950s (even among people my age; in much of Ireland the fifties didn't end until 1995, when we skipped straight to Thatcher's eighties),

Tana French

#68. I worry that some politicians still think we are living in the 1950s where the man is the main breadwinner and the woman works for pin money. Actually, most families where there are two parents depend on two incomes to get by.

Frances O'Grady

#69. According to these new rules, the U.S. government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability - only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution.

Naomi Klein

#70. At one stage, I didn't have any money, so I slept on the streets for a few nights. It wasn't uncommon in the 1950s, and it wasn't uncommon to be out of money. There wasn't anywhere to go to get money.

Kerry Stokes

#71. The huge difference in my lifetime is that you can just go up to somebody and make a pass. You couldn't do that in the 1950s if you were gay. There were secret handshakes, a secret language. There was nowhere you could go to be romantic outside of people's houses.

Ian McKellen

#72. 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.

Megan Fox

#73. I can walk about London and see a society that seems an absolutely revolutionary change from the 1950s, that seems completely and utterly different, and then I can pick up on something where you suddenly see that it's not.

Penelope Lively

#74. There was such a lack of modern, recognizable role models for a young girl in the 1950s. I mean, 'Leave It to Beaver' didn't speak to me. That's why I latched on to music.

Patti Scialfa

#75. I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.

Edmund White

#76. In the 1950s, when I was hanging around Sullivan's Gym and the Gramercy Gym, there were fixed fights. Mob guys like Frankie Carbo and Blinky Palermo had taken over the sport; one lightweight champion loaned his title to others at least twice; the welterweight division was a slag heap.

Pete Hamill

#77. As someone who's been covering presidential campaigns since the 1950s, I have no delusions about political reporting. Candidates bargaining access to get the kind of news coverage they want is nothing new.

Dan Rather

#78. Instead of watching cartoons when I was little, I had Russian ballet videos from, like, the 1950s and 1940s.

Sarah Hay

#79. There's no question that the '70s themselves were really wide open. There was just so much being done at that time. Every year, the major studios were commissioning things that they would never touch today or even thought of touching in the 1950s.

Frank Pierson

#80. A different Australia emerged in the 1950s. A multicultural one, and 30 years on we're still trying to fit in as ethnics and we're still trying to fit the ethnics in as Australians.

Melina Marchetta

#81. Ford Maddox Ford's 'The Good Soldier' is my favourite novel. I first read it in the 1950s and have read it about 20 times since. It's possibly the best-constructed book in the English language.

Ruth Rendell

#82. A fellowship to Oxford acquainted me with the depths of English cooking. By the twenty-first century, London's best restaurants are as good as Paris's, but not in the 1950s.

Donald Hall

#83. In the 1950s and 60s, geopolitical intrigues did not much engage masses in Asia and Africa; it was something for elites to sort out.

Pankaj Mishra

#84. People who, like me, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s after World War II, grew up with cars.

Martin Winterkorn

#85. Yes. Yes, when we live our life like 1950s detective films. I often go to my fridge, "Hullo, we're out of milk. I say mother, where's the milk?"

Bill Bailey

#86. 'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.

Romesh Gunesekera

#87. The suburb in the 1950s was a bedroom community. The father worked in the city, and the mother stayed home. Now people live and work in the suburbs, and businesses have grown up or moved from cities to certain pockets of what was once the suburbs and created these places that are like cities.

Richard Hayne

#88. I grew up in the 1950s at the beginning of rock n' roll, and would strum a tennis racket in front of the mirror.

Jonathan Pryce

#89. 'The Lord of the Rings,' published in the mid-1950s, was intended as a prehistory to our own world. It was perceived by Tolkien to be a small but significant episode in a vast alternate mythology constructed entirely out of his own imagination.

Peter Jackson

#90. When I started in the late 1950s, every film I made - no matter how low the budget - got a theatrical release. Today, less that 20-percent of our films get a theatrical release.

Roger Corman

#91. 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?

Douglas Coupland

#92. But let's just say, I'm Irish. I grew up in the 1950s. Religion had a very tight iron fist.

Liam Neeson

#93. While I'm frustrated at the amount I'm expected to take on in the present, the 1950s woman was frustrated by being excluded - not being allowed to take things on at all.

Sara Sheridan

#94. In the mid-1950s Winston Churchill advised his American friends to recognize that Ho Chi Minh was unbeatable, accept his victory, and try to make the best of it. This the Dulles brothers could not do - because they were Americans.

Stephen Kinzer

#95. With regard to robots, in the early days of robots people said, 'Oh, let's build a robot' and what's the first thought? You make a robot look like a human and do human things. That's so 1950s. We are so past that.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson

#96. 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.

Siddhartha Mukherjee

#97. I grew up in Colombo but was lucky enough to spend a lot of time in the countryside as well. Although there was considerable turbulence, even in the 1950s, it did not throw a shadow on my consciousness.

Romesh Gunesekera

#98. Between 18 and 19 years old [in the 1950s] I came to Paris. I studied art. And that experience really did change my life. I was living hand to mouth. I walked everywhere. I thought, this city is incredible but you really have to experience it by walking it.

Robert Redford

#99. The 1950s and 1960s had been a period of enormous growth, the highest in American history, maybe in economic history.

Noam Chomsky

#100. Last chances in the Middle East have been two a dirham since the 1950s. Each year the enmities are more profound, the despots more bloodthirsty and clownish, the violence more extreme, and the conditions of ordinary existence more ghastly.

James Buchan