Quotes About The 1920s

#1. Probably no other country in the 1920s - certainly not the United States, with its stark repression of the Left, vicious antiunion policies, and legally enshrined racism - had so wide a range of free speech, such a vital public sphere, as Germany.

Eric D. Weitz

#2. Mother's interest in contemporary American artists emerged during the 1920s.

David Rockefeller

#3. We used to be so proud that our country offered far more economic opportunities than the feudal system in Great Britain, with its royal family, princesses and dukes. But social mobility in the UK is higher than in the US. Our social rift is as big as it was in the 1920s.

Robert Reich

#4. Since the 1920s, when some U.S. cruise ships decided to fly a Panamanian flag to avoid Prohibition regulations, ships have commonly flown the flag of countries foreign to their owners. The benefits are obvious: lower taxes, laxer labor and safety laws.

Rose George

#5. What we think of as Halloween is really the product of media barons, city mayors, and candy-makers. You know, before the 1920s, Halloween was really a terrible, terrible night.

Chuck Palahniuk

#6. 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

#7. On my second swim at Deception Island, the water was very clear and I was looking at hundreds of whale bones beneath me. It was a graveyard from the whaling some time in the 1920s-30s.

Lewis Gordon Pugh

#8. The 1920s brought not only the Charleston but the flat chest.

Robert Gottlieb

#9. I've seen 13, 14-year-olds opening CDs as though they're records from the 1920s, going 'Look at this - there's a little book!' ... That makes me think the format has probably had its day.

Jonny Greenwood

#10. I find more and more that I am a man of the 1920s. I still expect something exciting. Drinks, animated conversation, gaiety: the uninhibited exchange of ideas.

Edmund Wilson

#11. The 1920s and 1930s were a period of sensational productivity growth: new products were springing up all over the place, and most of those new products and new methods were developed by people who started their own companies.

Edmund Phelps

#12. In the 1920s you could buy stocks on margin. You could put 10 percent down and borrow the rest against your stocks.

Ron Chernow

#13. Beaumont-Hamel sits within a thousand acres of French agriculture. The trenches are under this blanket of grass. In the 1920s, a park was established here and trees from Newfoundland imported to encircle the battlefield so you get the feeling of being within a copse of woods.

Michael Winter

#14. If you go back all the way to the 1920s, filmmakers in Hollywood changed the identity of villains from German to Russian.

Evan Osnos

#15. In the United States today we have the most unequal wealth and income distribution of any major country on earth - worse than at any time since the 1920s. This is an economy that must be changed in fundamental ways.

Bernie Sanders

#16. In the course of the 1920s and 1930s, great progress was made in the study of the intermediary reactions by which sugar is anaerobically fermented to lactic acid or to ethanol and carbon dioxide.

Hans Adolf Krebs

#17. It was in the 1920s, when nobody had time to reflect, that I saw a still-life painting with a flower that was perfectly exquisite, but so small you really could not appreciate it.

Georgia O'Keeffe

#18. [T]he salient question is whether the increasing awareness of [heart] disease beginning in the 1920s coincided with the budding of an epidemic or simply better technology for diagnosis.

Gary Taubes

#19. There are a lot of historical lofts in Houston, and it's amazing for me that a lot of them were built in the 1920s. I love the exposed bricks and the very industrial stuff.

Solange Knowles

#20. (In the 1920s, two Chicago chemists had to puree several thousand pounds of bull testicles from a stockyard to get a few ounces of the first pure testosterone.)

Sam Kean

#21. Phule had propounded the theory of the Aryan invasion as the source of oppression; dalit radicals of the 1920s took it to its extreme; Amedkar denied it.

Gail Omvedt

#22. I enjoy how women dressed in the 1920s with the shimmering jewels and rich feathers.

Janelle Monae

#23. Income inequality increased quite sharply in the United States during the 1920s, however, peaking on the eve of the 1929 crash with more than 50 percent of national income going to the top decile -

Thomas Piketty

#24. Images sometimes capture particular periods in history. The unreachable green light, beckoning from across the bay in 'The Great Gatsby,' has become a symbol of the yearning of America in the 1920s.

David Ignatius

#25. In the 1920s, we thought the problems associated with alcohol could be solved by police and jails. Prohibition taught us we were wrong. The strategy of the present drug war is Prohibition redux.

Rodney S. Quinn

#26. The 1920s are the decade that signaled the arrival of a gift that still means a lot to us: Saturday.

Amity Shlaes

#27. After the collapse of Wall Street in the 1920s, the culture stopped being all about money, and the country survived and ultimately flourished.

Graydon Carter

#28. Since the founding of quantum mechanics in the 1920s, theoretical physics had nurtured an extremely radical tradition.

David Gross

#29. They wanted to know, you see. They were afraid that with our typical Austrian faces, we might be able to pass. They didn't want to be fooled. Even then, in the 1920s, they wanted to be able to tell who was a Jew.

Edith Hahn Beer

#30. I grew up around some great philosophers: they were coal miners and cowboys born in the 1920s. They were also vets of World War II. Listen to your elders, there isn't any better wisdom for you.

Stanley Victor Paskavich

#31. Archaeologists have used aerial photographs to map archaeological sites since the 1920s, while the use of infrared photography started in the 1960s, and satellite imagery was first used in the 1970s.

Sarah Parcak

#32. Up until the 1920s, everyone thought the universe was essentially static and unchanging in time.

Stephen Hawking

#33. Among the worst examples is that of the Alberni Indian Residential School (British Columbia) where, during the 1920s, children caught talking Indian suffered the hideous ordeal of having sewing needles pushed through their tongues.

Ward Churchill

#34. Going back to the 1920s, when Stalin ordered the most famous animal breeder in Russia to do it, to make a new race of soldiers for him. His name was Ivanov,

Michael Crichton

#35. The destruction of images, the first signs of which reach back to the 1920s, eliminated a lot of kitsch and unworthy art, but ultimately it left behind a void.

Pope Benedict XVI

#36. I suppose people hadn't really thought each decade should have its own character and be different from the others till the 1920s, although I remember in a nineteenth-century Russian novel someone remarked that a character was a typical man of the 1830s - progressive and an atheist.

Edmund White

#37. When runaway inflation and bank failures struck in Germany in the 1920s, the middle class was destroyed, which led directly to the rise of the Nazis.

Nick Clooney

#38. At the Ahwahnee Lodge in Yosemite National Park. Built in the 1920s, the Ahwahnee is a sprawling pile of stone, concrete, and timber designed in a style that mixed Art Deco, the Arts and Crafts movement,

Walter Isaacson

#39. If I could have lived as an actress in any period, it would have been the 1920s - I would have loved to have been part of that speakeasy era.

Lauren Bacall

#40. If you look at the entrance halls of the skyscrapers of the 1920s and 1930s, they are very welcoming. They are public spaces with enormous amounts of display and marble and so on. They were havens off the street.

Joseph Rykwert

#41. Democrats in state legislatures are at their lowest level since the 1920s. President Obama has a can't-miss strategy to save the party in 2016. He's leaving.

Craig Ferguson

#42. I worked hard learning harmony and theory when I was growing up in Chicago in the 1920s.

Lionel Hampton

#43. The United States created the best popular songs that were ever written, and from the 1920s to the 1940s, it was a renaissance period. It stopped in 1950.

Tony Bennett

#44. It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.

Naomi Klein

#45. Some of my favorite moments from The Vampire Diaries were from season 3. I found the storyline between Stefan and Klaus to be extremely compelling. It was a friend/foe type friendship, rooted in depth that took us back to the 1920s.

Paul Wesley

#46. In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#47. I think the concept of polo that people had in the 1920s and the 1930s was much more accurate, when going to a polo match was seen as a great day out and great fun on a more popular level.

Nacho Figueras

#48. During the 1920s New York Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert once described his perfect afternoon at Yankee Stadium. 'It's when the Yankees score eight runs in the first inning,' Ruppert said, 'and then slowly pull away.'

Peter Golenbock

#49. I'm obsessed with the 1920s, everything from the style to the lifestyle. It was a really cool era.

Lauren Conrad

#50. I draw a distinction between traditional Islam and Islamism. Islamism emerged in its modern form in the 1920s and is driven by a belief that Muslims can be strong and rich again if they follow the Islamic law severely and in its entirety. This is a response to the trauma of modern Islam.

Daniel Pipes

#51. In the 1920s and 1930s, scientists from both the political left and right would not have found the idea of designer babies particularly dangerous - though, of course, they would not have used that phrase.

Richard Dawkins

#52. Egypt was the first democracy in the Middle East. Women were unveiled in the 1920s. Egypt is a country of civilization, of culture. It shouldn't be suffering.

Ahmed Zewail

#53. I'm really fascinated with anything that takes place between the 1920s up through the 1960s. In some ways it feels familiar, and in other ways it feels like it's from another planet.

Colin Hanks

#54. Broccoli is not a Chinese vegetable; in fact, it is originally an Italian vegetable. It was introduced into the United States in the 1800s, but became popularized in the 1920s and the 1930s.

Jennifer Lee

#55. When it comes to our foreign policy, you seem to want to import the foreign policies of the 1980s, just like the social policies of the 1950s and the economic policies of the 1920s.

Barack Obama

#56. I wasn't that familiar with silent films. I didn't know, for example, how hugely popular silent films were in the 1920s, how people would go to the movies several times a week.

Laura Moriarty

#57. What, after all, is the narrative of 'the American Dream?' It was a discourse formulated between the 1880s and the 1920s in the United States during the great waves of migration and expansion and reforms of the Progressive Era.

Naomi Wolf

#58. Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.

Naomi Wolf

#59. The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.

Duke Ellington

#60. In the 1920s dramatists attacked their subjects as if the inequities could be resolved. Some of the traditional optimism of America lurked behind most of the early plays. But not now. There is no conviction now that the problem will be solved.

Brooks Atkinson

#61. The 1920s was a great time for reading altogether - very possibly the peak decade for reading in American life. Soon it would be overtaken by the passive distractions of radio, but for the moment reading remained most people's principal method for filling idle time.

Bill Bryson

#62. We were like a white family from the 1920s or something. My parents had this bizarre, different way of looking at things from the people that surrounded us. I went to an all-Mexican grade school and an all-black high school, and not many people in those places liked the same stuff as me.

Jack White

#63. Corporatist attitudes against capitalism came to the fore in the 1920s. Corporatists, with their conservative values, hated the invasion of towns and regions by new businesses, upsetting traditional ways, wealth and status.

Edmund Phelps

#64. Change life! Change Society! These ideas lose completely their meaning without producing an appropriate space. A lesson to be learned from soviet constructivists from the 1920s and 30s, and of their failure, is that new social relations demand a new space, and vice-versa.

Henri Lefebvre

#65. Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable.

Alejandro Jodorowsky

#66. When we studied the 1920s, he pretended that cell phones were illegal and made half the class narcs, and then he had us read The Great Gatsby.

Alison Umminger

#67. Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, film has been a shadow thrown over the minds of all novelists. Ever since, novelists have strained to make themselves more relevant and, whether consciously or not, novel-writing has been influenced by cinematic doctrines - by turns, embracing and defying it.

Matthew Pearl

#68. In my grammar school years back in the 1920s I used my ten-cents-a-week allowance for Saturday matinees of Douglas Fairbanks movies. All that swashbuckling and leaping about in the midst of the sails of ships!

Beverly Cleary

#69. We had had mass immigration from the late 1800s all the way through the early 1900s to the 1920s, and we had to pause the immigration in order to for the new arrivals to assimilate, to become Americans, to learn English, for one thing. The one thing - or not the one; there are many different things.

Rush Limbaugh

#70. Income and wealth inequality in America today has reached levels not seen since the 1920s. Corporate

Hillary Rodham Clinton

#71. I'm drawn to intergenerational tension, and it must have been strong in the 1920s: I wondered how Louise's [Brooks] generation of flappers appeared to the women who came of age at the beginning of the century - wearing corsets, long skirts, and high collars.

Laura Moriarty

#72. Over-the-knee socks remind me of the 1920s, silent films, and the stars of the era who wore the rolled-down stockings. They sort of referenced that in 'Cabaret,' when Liza Minnelli was singing 'Mein Herr,' and I love the way she looks in that scene.

Amy Heckerling

#73. John Watson, a leading childcare authority in the 1920s, sternly advised parents, 'Never hug and kiss [your children], never let them sit in your lap. If you must, kiss them once on the forehead when they say goodnight. Shake hands with them in the morning.'22

Yuval Noah Harari

#74. The books of the 1920s and '30s that are most inviting, with their handy size, generous margins, and sharp letterpress type.

John Updike

#75. The labor movement had been pretty much killed in the 1920s, almost destroyed. It revived in the 1930s and made a huge difference. By the late 1930s the business world was already trying to find ways to beat it back.

Noam Chomsky

#76. In the 1920s and 1930s they hit upon the bright idea of co-opting genetics and treating it as one of the Theory of Evolution's components. A

Tom Wolfe

#77. There were two qualities about the mutual funds of the 1920s that made them extremely speculative. One was that they were heavily leveraged. Two, mutual funds were allowed to invest in other mutual funds.

Ron Chernow

#78. In the 1920s, Wall Street was a world that was really dominated by professional speculators and stock pools. These people had a monopoly over information.

Ron Chernow

#79. He thinks you were trapped in a tree in the 1920s. How is that not crazy?

Kathy Bryson

#80. I decided that if I want to write about a female hero in the 1920s, I'm going to have to give her all the advantages I can because she has serious disadvantages in being a woman. I wasn't going to have her cowed or overawed by class, so she had to be titled.

Kerry Greenwood

#81. Like the skyscraper, the automobile, and the motion-picture palace, neon signs once symbolized popular hopes for a new era of technological achievement and commercial abundance. From the 1920s to the 1950s, neon-lit streets pulsed with visual excitement from Vancouver to Miami.

Virginia Postrel

#82. Just as outlawing alcohol did not work in the 1920s, current attempts to prohibit online gambling will not work, either.

John Conyers

#83. By the 1920s, sugar refineries were producing as much sugar in a single day - millions of pounds - as would have taken refineries in the 1820s an entire decade. With

Gary Taubes

#84. The choice is not between drugs and no drugs, but between illegal drugs and legal drugs. Until the 1920s drugs were legal, why not now? Lots of people are on drugs anyway - it is called medication.

David Hockney

#85. I did listen to 1920s jazz or Al Johnson and a lot of early singers coming out of England. I would branch out a little bit to get a sense of the world that he might be coming into, in the '30s when jazz was changing.

Ed Speleers

#86. I buy 1920s iridescent Scottish glass. I love the way the sun hits it every morning. You touch something and you know. To me, people should buy something they love. Buy something you'd want to come downstairs and stroke.

Judith Miller

#87. Reagan grows up in 1920s Dixon, Illinois, and it's the heartland of America. It's a time when Americans are particularly drawn to this small town world because it's beginning to pass.

Robert Dallek

#88. The Bright Young People. The press love and hate them - they celebrate them, they vilify them, and they know full well that they would not shift nearly so many papers without them.

Lucy Foley

#89. A 1920s dress I wore on my 21st birthday ... literally disintegrated on me. I had the most wild debauched night. And that disintegrated dress sits in my closet - such a great memory.

Liz Goldwyn

#90. Pleasure was the color of the time.

Harold Clurman

#91. In L.A., retro culture is just part of the thing you do. When we were kids, we didn't have allowances, and it was not cool to wear designer clothes. So it meant that we were into 1920s dresses when we were 13.

Liz Goldwyn

#92. As my name might suggest, I'm Jewish. My grandparents were Polish and Russian Jews who came to Australia in the late 1920s, and had they not, we wouldn't be talking now.

Elliot Perlman

#93. The prosecutor uttered the party line that would distinguish revue from burlesque for the next thirty years. The difference is movement. On Broadway, unadorned female figures are used to artistic advantage in tableaux. They do not move.

Dita Von Teese

#94. Now I am old-fashioned. A woman, I consider, should be womanly. I have no patience with the modern neurotic girl who jazzes from morning to night, smokes like a chimney, and uses language which would make a billingsgate fishwoman blush!

Agatha Christie

#95. By the mid 1920s the typical American town was in full sexual bloom. The change came with erotic fashions, literature and movies, and an unsuspected sexual aid, the automobile.

John Leo

#96. Frank Fay turned into the most consistent stand-up comic of the late 1920s and essentially changed the art form. Crowds and critics eventually came to accept a man standing alone, cracking wise. No longer did Fay bill himself as a 'Nut Monologist.

Kliph Nesteroff

#97. By the early 1920s, the America of Jefferson, Lincoln, Whitman, and the young William Jennings Bryan had ceased to exist. It had been replaced by the world of McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt, J. Edgar Hoover, and Woodrow Wilson.

Oliver Stone

#98. His words are so slippery they might slide right off the page.

Jami Attenberg

#99. I asked my designer friend, Sam Klemick, to make a headdress for me, drawing inspiration from 1920s headpieces, Athena and Joan of Arc. Before each show, I have this quiet meditative moment where I put the headdress on and gather my thoughts and strength.

Sydney Wayser

#100. We have been helping, trying to help Afghanistan in many ways, even from the beginning of ... the beginnings of the '20s, 1920s, when he we were fighting our own national struggle.

Bulent Ecevit