Top 100 Quotes About The 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. 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
#6. 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
#7. People talk about the '60s, but they were merely a mass production of what the '50s had begun.
Peter O'Toole
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#18. To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.
Annette Funicello
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. I love the '50s and grew up loving works from that time period and from those great playwrights.
Sebastian Stan
#22. My musical influences are from the '50s: Bill Evans, Miles Davis and Ahmad Jamal.
Michael Moriarty
#23. 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
#24. 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
#25. 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
#26. You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s.
Paul Kantner
#27. 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
#28. The 50s were great because I collected stamps.
Robert Plant
#29. 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
#30. 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
#31. 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
#32. 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
#33. 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
#34. The '50s and the '70s are sort of similar in that they're both times of major paranoia in America.
Noah Hawley
#35. 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
#36. The climate in the '50s and '60s for black performers or black people in the entertainment business was atrocious. It was atrocious.
Quincy Jones
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. I probably went to musique concrete concerts - though not the very first ones - at the beginning of the 50s.
Luc Ferrari
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. In the '50s, critics used to say I had a 'dangerous' act.
Eartha Kitt
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Authors and artists are still afraid of breaking away as far as [William Burroughs] did ... And he did it in the 50s!
Yony Leyser
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. Mad Men - it seems like they try to capture this glamorized version of the '50s and '60s advertising culture.
Geoffrey Gray
#57. It might have been really cool back in the '50s when it was less populated but I don't know.
John Leguizamo
#58. Parodies of commercials are by no means new and have been popular going back to black-and-white TV shows of the '50s.
Dan Aykroyd
#59. I was trained in the '50s as a New Critic. I remember what literature was like before the New Critics, when people stood up and talked about Shelley's soul and such things.
Clifford Geertz
#60. Even post-WWII, nobody talked about the Holocaust. It wasn't until the '50s that people started talking about it.
Eli Roth
#61. In the '50s, listening to Elvis and others on the radio in Bombay - it didn't feel alien. Noises made by a truck driver from Tupelo, Mississippi, seemed relevant to a middle-class kid growing up on the other side of the world. That has always fascinated me.
Salman Rushdie
#62. There were some television sets back in the '50s, but they were expensive. People would gather at the rich guy's apartment down the hall to watch Milton Berle on his 10-inch black-and-white screen.
Al Feldstein
#63. The Blues scene now is international. In the '50s it was purely something that you would hear in black clubs, played by black musicians, especially in America. But from the '60s onwards it changed.
Mick Taylor
#64. I just dress like ... I'm an old black man. Sorry! Like I'm an old Jewish black man. I just dress like it's still the '50s.
Amy Winehouse
#65. In those days, man, in the '50s, black people in the South ... We didn't recognize contracts that much. And we didn't recognize marriages that much, either.
Ike Turner
#66. In the '50s and '60s, the life of a gay man was a secret. Homosexuality was illegal, so you didn't draw attention to yourself.
Ian McKellen
#67. In the '50s, women aspired to dress like their mothers - this polished, controlled, formal way of dressing. Then all of a sudden in the '60s, going into the '70s, they stopped dressing like their mothers.
Robin Givhan
#68. What was great about the 50s is that for one brief moment - maybe, say, six weeks - nobody understood art.
Morton Feldman
#69. One thing that got me started on it was the jean jacket. It's an item that could make you believe you're in the 50s or punk-rock 70s or grunge 90s. I was really focused on timelessness, and I think music is very timeless.
Drew Barrymore
#70. Most of my career up until the last couple of years has basically been a training ground for me. Actors that came up in the '50s and '60s, they had the theater, and television was in its infancy.
Thomas Jane
#71. 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.
Anthony Braxton
#72. I wanted to make an unashamed pop record. I became obsessed with Disney soundtracks from the '50s, so I decided to make my own.
Mika.
#73. We got to know the competition very well. In the '50s popcorn made a big growth in sales. Our main push was to produce the best quality and sell in quality retail outlets.
Orville Redenbacher
#74. I went to big, broken, under-resourced public schools, but we had a real sense of community, because those were days in the '50s and the '60s when every child was under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block.
Deval Patrick
#75. It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!
Thom Gunn
#77. When I was a kid and putting out my first records, there was a lot made out of the fact that the '50s/'60s generation was so dominant.
Beck
#78. Vernon Reis opened the world to me through books. He taught me that while I was physically firmly planted in blue-collar Auburn, Washington in the 50s and early 60s, intellectually I could go anywhere, explore anything, and sample exciting new ideas simply by opening a book.
Christine Gregoire
#79. I've been influenced by some of the greatest designers. Charles Eames. And Bruno Munari in the '50s in Italy - when they had to retool the industry of war into an industry to help society. In a way, I'm influenced by designers that were there at a radical time of change.
Yves Behar
#80. Throughout the '50s, tons of unknown locals came through Sun to record their demos. Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis all made their first recordings at the former Memphis Recording Service.
Shawn Amos
#81. The truth is I made a few good movies in the '50s, then went into freefall.
Jose Ferrer
#82. 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.
Zooey Deschanel
#83. You know, because of the lack of budget, we had to find neighborhoods where time had stopped - kind of stuck in the '50s. And no place had that better than Staten Island.
Jason Alexander
#84. It's like how science fiction in the '50s was a way of talking about war without actually having to risk any political capital. The obvious metaphor is power and powerlessness, but I also think it's a way of experimenting with dangerous feelings in a safe arena and trying things out.
Margaret Stohl
#85. I always get pissed that I can't make my voice sound like someone from the 50s who had a very girly, innocent voice, like Leslie Gore.
Bethany Cosentino
#86. If you go back to the '50s and '60s ... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley ... and it crept northward in early 2000s.
Mitch Kapor
#87. Critics have always questioned whether players like Pele from the 50s could play today. Lionel Messi could play in the 1950s and the present day, as could Di Stefano, Pele, Maradona, Cruyff because they are all great players. Lionel Messi without question fits into that category.
Alex Ferguson
#88. I decided to write Westerns because there was a terrific market for Westerns in the '50s. There were a lot of pulp magazines, like 'Dime Western' and '10 Story Western' that were still being published. The better ones paid two cents a word. And I thought, 'I like Westerns.'
Elmore Leonard
#89. The people who were in college in the '50s were my first real audience, and their kids, the people who found my records in the cabinet during their 'Mad 'magazine years picked me up also.
Tom Lehrer
#90. In the '50s, to appropriate was a real no-no. However, once you go from Duchamp to Jasper Johns to Warhol, appropriation becomes not only a common thing to do, but possibly the central way of working in the era we call postmodernism.
Irving Sandler
#92. 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.
Tom Bosley
#93. One of my reasons for living in California is its close proximity to Mexico. The Latin influence is in every corner of the community. My love of Spanish music hasn't wavered since the '50s. I could hear the blues voicing from the Flamanco families and I always dig for inspiration in Latin music.
Eric Burdon
#94. If anyone was talking about journalism in the '50s - it was Edward R.Murrow.
David Strathairn
#95. I always have directors who are somewhat frustrated because they'll reference a beautifully obscure film from the '50s or '60s or '70s, and I've not seen it.
Amy Adams
#96. I love '50s music, all that stuff from the '50s.
Steve Jones
#97. When I was growing up in the 50s it wasn't quite the same. Fathers were more protective and now they see all of the possibilities for their daughters.
Nancy Pelosi
#98. My dad worked as an executive at Lockheed Aircraft and worked on the U-2 and things like that. My mother was a homemaker, and she was vice-president of the Democratic Council of California back in the '50s.
Robert Englund
#99. Bowling really was a big American sport in the '50s, '60s, and '70s, and then it kind of died off in the '80s.
Chris Hardwick
#100. Burger King's business model was broken. But it was like sex in the '50s. Everyone knew it, but no one would talk about it.
Greg Brenneman
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