Top 100 Quotes About 50s
#1. I grew up in the '50s, in New York City, where television was born. There were 90 live shows every week, and they used a lot of kids. There were schools just for these kids. There was a whole world that doesn't exist anymore.
Christopher Walken
#2. In the '50s Morris Louis and I were not known, David Smith and Helen Frankenthaler were not much known.
Kenneth Noland
#3. In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.
Bill Condon
#4. 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.
Brittany Snow
#5. Back in the '30s, '40s and '50s, you had clear-cut heroes, clear-cut supervillains. Today, you have more of a blend, more of a gray area between the two. You have the rise of the sympathetic villain and the rise of the antihero.
Jim Lee
#6. There's that thing about the '80s, the '40s and the '60s, and the '30s, the '50s and the '70s. Something about those odd decades in this century that weren't too pleasant.
Paul Kantner
#7. I'm still proud of the 'Fionavar Tapestry.' The fact I don't write the same way is as much as anything else the fact a man in his 50s doesn't write the way a man in his 20s does - or he shouldn't.
Guy Gavriel Kay
#8. The video for 'Whatever' is kind of a documentary in a way. It's showing that love can last. Not just in your early 20s or your late 30s, but in your 50s, 60s and 70s. There's an awful myth out there that when you get married, love and lovemaking fade. It's not true.
Jill Scott
#9. My dad was an agent for Met Life. In the '50s, I remember the mortality rate was something like - you had - 58 was the average age. Then it was moved up to 62, and then 65, 68.
Willard Scott
#10. People talk about the '60s, but they were merely a mass production of what the '50s had begun.
Peter O'Toole
#11. Back in the '50s and '60s, most politicians were concerned about not talking about faith, partly because there were consequences you had to deal with - (for instance) Catholicism had been made an issue.
Barack Obama
#12. Well, probably the best way to put it might be that at some time, not just in an instant, but over some period of time I became aware of the fact that I wanted to document examples like Kroger or Piggly Wiggly in the late '50s, early '60s.
William Eggleston
#13. I like the idea of defying the convention of what it is to be in your 40s, or 50s, or 60s.
Anthony Kiedis
#14. By the end of the 50s, everything began to collapse and, little by little, I lost all of my work. I lost Rex, the Wonder Dog and all the westerns.
Gil Kane
#15. After being an Impressionist, Cubist, and an Abstract Expressionist, I was influenced by realistic artists, including Andrew Wyeth in the late '50s, and I haven't changed my style since.
Robert Bateman
#16. My cinema - the '50s, '60s - is different from the cinema today so I thought that it would not be bad to show that kind of cinema where we could dream.
Gina Lollobrigida
#17. As I look back at the span of the Cold War in those early days, in the '50s, for example, there was a great deal of Soviet propaganda here in the United States, but it was clumsy, and it was anchored to a lot of ideological support in certain circles in America itself.
Alexander Haig
#18. I think because my parents died in their early 50s, mid 50s, I always thought I would die young. And that's been both a useful thing and I suspect something that's haunted me a little bit.
Stephen Dunn
#19. They use all of the music that I did in the '50s, '60s and the '70s behind people like Tupac and LL Cool J. I'm into all that stuff.
Donald Byrd
#20. I've always been drawn to the American style in the late '50s and '60s.
Thom Browne
#21. My dad had a commercial film company, so he had a videotape player before anyone. So he got Mel Brooks movies or Citizen Kane or some classic old movies. And every summer the revival house in Evanston would show the great films from the '50s and '60s and '70s.
John Cusack
#22. I grew up in New York, and I've always been surrounded by fashion. My grandmother used to write for 'Vogue' in the '50s, and my mother was a dancer and a model.
Dean Winters
#23. The difference between rearing a child in your 20s and one in your 50s is one of patience.
Iman
#24. In the 50s and 60s, kids were taught how to shake hands. They were taught how to have manners. There needs to be a lot more of that kind of stuff because the autistic mind doesn't pick up social things and subtle cues.
Temple Grandin
#25. Think back to the early rock n' roll records, and the average record length in the '50s - and well into the '60s - was two and a half minutes. It's very hard to put that much songwriting into two and a half minutes.
J. D. Souther
#27. I can't imagine any reasonably responsible person arguing against the abortion of mongols ... If we could tell what foetuses are going to be affected with cancer in their 40s and 50s, I would be for aborting them now.
Cecil Jacobson
#28. To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.
Annette Funicello
#29. That's where I live, a junkyard in a neighborhood of junkyards. We have three tractors from the 1940s and '50s, several old pickup trucks, and a pile of scrap metal.
Bonnie Jo Campbell
#30. My dad grew up in Pittsburgh in the '50s, and he used to sing Four Seasons songs on the stoop. He made me listen to Cousin Brucie - the guy who broke the Four Seasons on the radio. So I knew all of their songs, but I didn't know they were all by the same group.
Erich Bergen
#31. Really, each era has its own false nostalgia. We all put a picket fence up around something. For my generation it was the '50s, and for other generations it will be something else. Change is scary for everyone, as is complexity, contradiction, and an uncertain future.
Gary Ross
#32. I had always been interested in politics. I had assumed, for a variety of - well, for two reasons, being Jewish and being gay back in the late '50s, early '60s - that I would never be elected or anything, but I would participate as an activist.
Barney Frank
#33. I love the '50s and grew up loving works from that time period and from those great playwrights.
Sebastian Stan
#34. I think most people who get into their 50s reassess what made sense and what didn't make sense.
T.D. Jakes
#35. The popular songs that were written in the 1920s and '30s, '40s and early '50s were written by veterans - mostly men who'd had experience in life. How can you write a lyric if you haven't really lived life?
Rudy Vallee
#36. At one time musical theater, particularly in the '40s and '50s, was a big source of pop songs. That's how musical theater started, really - it was just a way of linking several pop songs for the stage.
Neil Tennant
#37. My musical influences are from the '50s: Bill Evans, Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal.
Michael Moriarty
#38. In recent generations, women's sports have been a blessing. Some of us can remember the bad old days in the '50s, when we would discover in casual schoolyard play that a girl could outrun most of us or hold her own in basketball or hit a softball - but there were no teams, no coaches, for girls.
George Vecsey
#39. I'd experienced the '40s and '50s by looking at my grandparents' old clothes, books, and magazines.
Christian Lacroix
#40. Of the great singing stars of the 1940s and '50s, only one - Nat King Cole - died young, at age 45.
Robert Gottlieb
#41. I would like to have directed Hollywood musicals in the '40s and '50s.
Matthew Bourne
#42. My introduction to photography and a lot of how I developed aesthetically was through '50s and early-'60s fashion magazines like Harper's Bazaar and Vogue.
Patti Smith
#43. We believed that there's no such thing as good art or bad art. Art is art. If it's bad, it's something else. It was a much, much harder line in the '50s and '60s than it is now, because the idea of art education didn't exist - they didn't have a fine arts program when I was a kid.
Billy Al Bengston
#44. I grew up in the '50s, a tough time for African Americans. I had friends whose fathers would openly say, 'Just bite your tongu;, don't cause any problems.' My father was not like that. Even in the toughest times racially, if somebody disrespected his family, they were in trouble.
Gregory Hines
#45. You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s.
Paul Kantner
#46. The bohemian life that reigned in Paris until the end of the '50s is gone. The artists had more time to think, to reflect; success didn't come so suddenly.
Pontus Hulten
#47. The 50s were great because I collected stamps.
Robert Plant
#48. When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today.
Gus Van Sant
#49. Married relationships are not what we are pretending they are. It is not the '40s or the 50s anymore - we cannot pretend, things are changing.
Matthew Ashford
#50. I am partial to a cartwheel or two. It's the way to go; I'll be doing them in my 50s, hopefully.
Donna Air
#51. Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.
Henry Louis Gates
#52. I have a lot of fake food in my apartment, but I'm picky about it. Old plaster food, like from the '50s is really nice, hollowed out paper-mache food from old plays - the new stuff just looks too good.
Amy Sedaris
#53. In the middle '50s, I had written that the point would come, inevitably, at which the relationship between the cause of conflict and political objectives would be lost.
Henry A. Kissinger
#54. Do you realize the FBI filing system from the '50s was much more secure? How could you have stolen that data? It was on notecards. Now someone with a thumb drive, or remotely, can take the equivalent of millions of those notecards.
Rick Smolan
#55. The same way that mid century modern architecture was in the 50s, I want to be as a human being. New. Different. Challenging the old. Function over frivolity. Clean living. Clean lines.
Jamie Lee Curtis
#56. The '50s and the '70s are sort of similar in that they're both times of major paranoia in America.
Noah Hawley
#57. I'm sure there were concussions galore back when we played, but the doctors would just say, 'Shake it off,' or something like that ... or 'Come on, you got to be tough ... get back in there.' I see so many guys who played pro football in their 50s now who are so debilitated from having played it.
Marv Levy
#58. Men are able to sustain a career into their 50s and 60s and still present themselves as sex symbols. With women, on the other hand, people say, 'Why doesn't she retire?'
Tracy Chapman
#59. Hip-hop, you can't really do that when you're in your 50s.
Robert Greene
#60. We moved into the back, made it into a little 50s sitting room and started to sell the records. We had an immediate success. For one thing, these Teddy Boys were thrilled to buy the records.
Vivienne Westwood
#61. I thought, I'm in my late 50s now, am I ever gonna get the chance to do another album again?
Marc Almond
#62. I'd like us to deliver a little message to all the men still out there who think it's the '50s, and coming home simply means watching television with a beer.
Patricia Richardson
#63. The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.
Quincy Jones
#64. The first 50 years are for learning, and the second 50 years are for living. Life just begins when you're in your 50s.
Vy Higginsen
#65. Many have referred to [Lewis] Carroll's rhymes as nonsense, but in my childhood world - Los Angeles in the '50s - they made perfect sense.
Wanda Coleman
#66. From the late 1940s, into and through the '50s, there developed a complex interaction between federal government, state and local government, real-estate interests, commercial interests and court decisions, which had the effect of undermining the mass transit system across the country.
Noam Chomsky
#67. I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s.
Luc Ferrari
#68. I'm sure there's a subconscious 'go for it' thing with turning 50. You want to do as much as possible and there are thoughts of how little time we have on the planet. For a lot of musicians in their 50s, the best days are behind them. I'd like to try and show that there is a future.
Paul Weller
#69. I love things that have a vintage feel to them, just because there's a certain texture to them that we just don't have anymore. In fact I think I've been stuck in the 50s or 60s for a while.
Amber Heard
#70. In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising.
Jerry Della Femina
#71. 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.
Aaron Johnson
#72. In the '50s, critics used to say I had a 'dangerous' act.
Eartha Kitt
#73. I was 16 years old, and I was just flailing around, looking for an interest. I heard, you know, these jazz records. They were modern records, at the time in the '50s, and I realized that I didn't fully get what was going on. But I liked a lot of what I heard.
Harvey Pekar
#74. Of course, if you think of a European or American household in the '50s, so what were the things that when people started climbing up the ladder, what did they buy? A fridge, a TV, I think piano was the number three item in say '53 or '54.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
#75. It used to be 65 when you went into retirement. Before that, when you got into your 50s, you were getting older.
Davy Jones
#76. I think I take my style from all walks of life, and all generations and decades of life as well. I love mixing '50s with '80s and classic with punk.
Kelly Osbourne
#77. I liked wearing the '50s wardrobe. It was hard in the beginning. The first shows I wore regular young girl dresses. Then a little later I got to wear the poodle skirts and such.
Erin Moran
#78. Jewish history has been in my cultural DNA since I was a child growing up in post-war London. In the midst of that dark, gray, lamenting monochromatic world of the '50s, I had a sense that both Jewish and English history were full of color and light and animation.
Simon Schama
#79. I decided to go to the cinema school because I thought it was a new sort of media. Nowadays, it's not anymore, but in the '50s, cinema had a half century of age. Today it's more than one century. I thought it was a new media, a new way of telling stories.
Costa-Gavras
#80. I'm enthralled by the national yearning that the Russians had during the 50s and 60s. The whole century was pretty rough for them. They suffered genocide, war, poverty, and half the population was sent to labor camps. But they were determined to get into space first.
George Meyer
#81. In the '50s, audiences accepted a level of artifice that the audiences in 1966 would chuckle at. And the audiences of 1978 would chuckle at what the audience of 1966 said was okay, too. The trick is to try to be way ahead of that curve, so they're not chuckling at your movies 20 years down the line.
Quentin Tarantino
#82. What decisions would you make differently today if you knew you would most likely live to be 150? How would you think about your 50s or 60s? How would you evaluate your career arcs or investments or even the area in which you live?
Peter Diamandis
#83. Authors and artists are still afraid of breaking away as far as [William Burroughs] did ... And he did it in the 50s!
Yony Leyser
#84. I'm very comfortable in my own skin now. I started just being myself more and more. For women, this happens as you get older. I loved my 40s - I thought they were fantastic. And I'm loving my 50s. I'm going to love everything because you're either older or dead!
Gloria Estefan
#85. 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.
A. Scott Berg
#86. People think unless you have loops and electronics and so on, you must be in your 50s. I quite like a lot of things that have loops and sequencers, but I couldn't really be bothered.
Teddy Thompson
#87. When I went to the Hall of Fame in 2000 and was inducted, it was a travesty the kind of carnage I saw out of these guys who were in their 50s and 60s, who had defined and in many ways laid the foundation for the NFL being what it is today.
Howie Long
#88. The rival ideologies of the left and right are both pining for the 50s. The only difference is that liberals want to work there, while conservatives want to go home there.
Brink Lindsey
#89. When my brother and me got into performing in the late '40s and early '50s, it was a sensational opportunity to learn from our elders. Every show we played had a dancer, a comic, a juggler, a singer, an acrobat. I came to appreciate virtuosity in all forms of the business.
Gregory Hines
#90. The average late-night viewer is in their mid-50s and the average viewer of TBS is in their 30s and is largely African-American and Hispanic, already, before I even get there.
George Lopez
#91. My father is Italian, and I never met my paternal grandparents. The family name was 'Caroselli' and it was changed in the mid '50s. I think they wanted to assimilate, which was pretty common, although I love the name 'Caroselli.'
Steve Carell
#92. There are so many venues in which stars are exposed today, that we just know much more and the studios don't have the control over stars like they used to, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
Mary Hart
#93. If a kid disappears, now there's Amber Alerts: they know this-this-this. In the '50s, we kids wandered around. Nobody knew what you were doing.
Caroline Leavitt
#94. I love when I am not typecast. I've been acting for 50 years. I was such a baby face; I was playing children until I was in my 30s, which frustrated me enormously. Now that I am 65 and getting to play women in their 50s, I am getting paid back for having to play children for so long.
Jacki Weaver
#95. I think the film is beautifully realised. His legacy as a journalist was recorded - as it were - well, and certainly the important issues of the '50s - or even today - are delivered and presented to the audience in a rather honest and objective way.
David Strathairn
#96. Harlem was an exciting place in the '50s. There were nightclubs that, as a student of Columbia, you dashed off to. The community seemed very viable still.
David Levering Lewis
#97. Our government works should be treated fairly and appropriately; they should have a decent retirement, but not a gold-plated system where they can retire multimillionaires in their 50s.
Bruce Rauner
#98. You go back to those films of the '40s and '50s and hear the dialogue, the way the people played off each other - the wordplay. I think we've really lost that in movies.
Clive Owen
#99. Mad Men - it seems like they try to capture this glamorized version of the '50s and '60s advertising culture.
Geoffrey Gray
#100. It might have been really cool back in the '50s when it was less populated but I don't know.
John Leguizamo
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