Quotes About The Fifties

#1. Right around the end of the fifties, college students and young people in general, began to realize that this music was almost like a history of our country - this music contained the real history of the people of this country.

Jackson Browne

#2. Music and fashion have had a kind of incestuous relationship since the Fifties. It started with people like Elvis Presley and pop icons like James Dean. Then it exploded in the MTV days. Now, with the Internet, it's instantaneous.

John Varvatos

#3. When we're out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties!

Dennis Hopper

#4. The fifties - they seem to have taken place on a sunny afternoon that asked nothing of you except a drifting belief in the moment and its power to satisfy.

Elizabeth Hardwick

#5. In the fifties I had dreams about touching a naked woman and she would turn to bronze or the dream about hot dogs chasing donuts through the Lincoln Tunnel.

Robert Klein

#6. Everybody in America grew up without a father even if they had one. It was the fifties. They were working.

Mona Simpson

#7. When I look at my life there are these streams, these things that have continuity from the fifties to now.

Anne Waldman

#8. Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let's remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.

Ann Druyan

#9. Food became, for dinner parties in the sixties, what abstract expressionism had been in the fifties.

Nora Ephron

#10. In the Fifties, my parents were known as 'America's sweethearts'. Their pictures graced the covers of all the newspapers. They were the Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston of their day.

Carrie Fisher

#11. In my small way I became an integral part of the pottery movement, and added fuel to the fire which consumed New Zealand and and swept pottery to the forefront of the of the fifties and sixties.

Theresa Sjoquist

#12. English television from the Fifties to the Nineties was the least bad in the world, and now it's just as bad as it is anywhere.

John Cleese

#13. I grew up in the Fifties and early Sixties, which were still quite conservative, and I wasn't given any information about sex or anything like that; I went out with girls at school because one had to. I didn't experiment with sex for quite a long time.

Elton John

#14. I guess that's one of the things about growing up in the fifties - it never occurred to me that you wouldn't be at least as successful as your parents.

Hunter S. Thompson

#15. In the forties, to get a girl you had to be a GI or a jock. In the fifties, to get a girl you had to be Jewish. In the sixties, to get a girl you had to be black. In the seventies, to get a girl you've got to be a girl.

Mort Sahl

#16. Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment's deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.

Robert C. Solomon

#17. Rock and roll's relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.

Albert Hammond Jr.

#18. The hotel looked as though it had been built back in the fifties, when everything seemed designed to be quickly turned into a bomb shelter.

Carolyn McCray

#19. I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.

Alice Walker

#20. One of the great things about the Fifties is there are so many secrets - people who've come back from the war and done these terrible things that they don't want to think about, or can't say what they did because they signed the Official Secrets Act.

Sara Sheridan

#21. In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces - destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.

John Major

#22. Some of Eminem's rap songs kind of have the teenage love songs like the fifties love songs. It's kind of like domestic drama set to music. He is really good storyteller.

Bruce Dickinson

#23. I want a revamped feminism. Putting the vamp back means the lady must be a tramp. My generation of the Sixties rebels wanted to smash the bourgeois codes that had become authoritarian totems of the Fifties ... Thirty years later, we're still stuck with the ["nice" girl].

Camille Paglia

#24. 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

#25. All the proliferating falsifications of what I and everyone I know experienced once in what it is now so convenient to call the "fifties" or "sixties," as if life was really measured or lived in arbitrary decades, when the history books are sold like comix.

Lester Bangs

#26. As an older person, I do feel an obligation to tell the story about what was really happening in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, as I saw it.

Grace Paley

#27. Oh you only think you know all I know. I don't even know what all I know. Half the time I just make it up, and it still turns out to be true! We learned that trick in the fifties. Tomorrow,

Tony Kushner

#28. What Autotune allows is for people like myself and Kanye West not to depend on the singer. Back in the Fifties, the songwriter was rendered invisible. Now the songwriter is there in the forefront.

Will.i.am

#29. You know, women have a history of just being - we've been told all our lives not to say - in the fifties you couldn't say birth or even be pregnant hardly on television - and then gradually things have changed.

Cybill Shepherd

#30. Both my parents were migrant workers who came to the U.K. in the Fifties to better themselves. The culture I grew up in was to work hard, save hard and to look after your family.

Sanjeev Bhaskar

#31. Living in the fifties America was in many ways like living in a public space that's suddenly emptied out, a theater after closing, or a classroom after school. The emptiness could feel liberating, but it could also make you feel blank and vaguely nostalgic.

James Harvey

#32. I was brought up in Zimbabwe, and there were seven of us in my family, so it was difficult to read aloud to us all. There weren't that many picture books around in the Fifties in Zimbabwe. My favourite was Heinrich Hoffmann's Struwwelpeter, which was really frightening.

Korky Paul

#33. If this were the fifties, she'd be checking Sam's collars for lipstick stains. (Did people do that anymore? Why did women kiss collars, anyway? Besides, Sam almost always wore T-shirts.)

Charlaine Harris

#34. My father is Hungarian and moved to Britain during the uprising, and my Spanish mum comes from Galicia; they moved here at the end of the Fifties.

Anton Du Beke

#35. In the fifties, no one wore beards. In Eisenhower's day, as in the time of the Founding Fathers, all chins were smooth, while during the Civil War, beards were as common as sepsis.

Donald Hall

#36. It evolved from my experience in the fifties, growing up during the McCarthy era, and hearing a lot of assumptions that America was wonderful and Communism was terrible.

Warren Farrell

#37. During the Fifties, political and military activities in Vietnam were heavily influenced by the French, who as recent colonial masters, made all-important decisions.

Nguyen Cao Ky

#38. In the fifties ... we were so busy being cool that we didn't know how to say the word love

Diane Di Prima

#39. I didn't understand 3-D in the fifties and I can't say I get it now either. I just don't see what the big deal is.

Richard Dreyfuss

#40. In Windsor in the forties, and even up into the fifties and sixties, if you were black, you had to sit in the balcony of the theatres, and you couldn't buy property in most places.

Wayne Grady

#41. The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

Edmund White

#42. The high point for me in my career was when Sinatra called me his favourite performer in the Fifties. And I've been sold out ever since.

Tony Bennett

#43. Racism is to the current era what unAmericanism was to the Fifties: a curse word that provides a handy substitute for logical thought.

Steve Sailer

#44. My memory of 3D movies is Fernando Lamas in a swashbuckling movie. And I suppose it had been the fifties, in which swords came out at you, bullets came out at you, things were thrown into the auditorium, apparently. All that sort of cheap, "Oh, look at us, we've got 3D" isn't in the film.

Ian McKellen

#45. Tango was very popular in Panama at the time when I was growing up. In the Fifties in Panama, the radio stations played all types of music.

Ruben Blades

#46. Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother 'worked' at anything besides raising her children.

Joyce Maynard

#47. One of the things I'm most proud of about my country is the fact that we did lick McCarthyism back in the fifties.

Pete Seeger

#48. You have to remember that I was an Australian girl of the Fifties and Sixties. For Australians at that time, it was imperative to get out of the country and discover the world.

Robyn Davidson

#49. The heavy scent of perfume and the red slashes of lipstick, so strong in the fifties, revolted me. For a time I resented her. She was the messenger and also the message

Patti Smith

#50. Hollywood movies of the Fifties, like The Ten Commandments and Ben-Hur, with their epic clash of pagan and Judeo-Christian cultures, tell more about art and society than the French-infatuated ideologues who have made a travesty of the best American higher criticism.

Camille Paglia

#51. These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.

Hannah Arendt

#52. Books did not need to be beautiful back in the Fifties, because nothing else was beautiful back then. Books were simply there: you read them because they were diverting or illuminating or in some way useful but not because the books themselves were aesthetically appealing.

Joe Queenan

#53. I grew up in the Fifties, and the majority of people in my class had fathers living at home. I was very aware that I was in the minority. I had a foreign name, and my daddy didn't come and pick me up from school. I felt like an outsider, which probably helped me as an actress.

Cherie Lunghi

#54. Young women today, as in the fifties, find themselves entering the big world and having to make choices.

Robert Gottlieb

#55. We wanted a supporting cast that would appeal to Baby Boomers who grew up in the fifties.

Randal Kleiser

#56. The oldest of North Korean labor camps, Bukchang had been hosting dissidents and alleged enemies of the state since the fifties .

David Baldacci

#57. The fifties are a peaceful time, a quiet sleeping time between two noisy bursts of years, a blue and white time filled with sweet yellow days, music and bright smelling memories.

David Gerrold

#58. I fought for peace in the fifties.

Pete Seeger

#59. I read The Stinky Cheese Man as an adult. I missed that book when I was a kid. I grew up mostly with books bought at yard sales, picture books from the fifties to 1975, which is really a lucky thing.

Mac Barnett

#60. I love all vintage-everything, really. I love fashion. I've always loved it. And the fifties, I've always loved.

Elle Fanning

#61. Later in the fifties I got involved in kinetic studies using my long forgotten math background.

William Standish Knowles

#62. I get nonplussed by all the Fifties retro-revival aesthetic. Would we really want to be in our pinnies in our kitchen weeping? I find the kitchen, housewifey aesthetic repugnant.

Romola Garai

#63. My dad was kind of a pool shark and had a Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin thing going on. I've always been fascinated by the fifties because of him. There was a hip, cool, anything-goes atmosphere back then, but looking good was still a priority.

Dylan McDermott

#64. There's sort of a progression going back to the fifties: Bubbles, Boom Boom, and Blaze begat Bambi, Candy, and Jewel, who begat Sunshine, Brandy, and Cinnamon, who begat Amber, Brittany, and Brie, who begat Reagan, Morgan, and Madison. Madison is a stripper name.

Christopher Moore

#65. The fifties was chosen for the visual and audio aspects, because that was the decade in which the most people had self-identified as being happy. Which is one of the goals here: maximum possible happiness. Who wouldn't tick that box? When

Margaret Atwood

#66. Growing up in the fifties, having to wear a dog tag, having to take shelter in a bomb shelter. That turned me toward the road, I did not want to live in fear of that, I was gong to work somehow against what that vision was, and what that horror was. It was poetry, art, music.

Anne Waldman

#67. As a lad growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, I played both Gaelic football and soccer and loved them both.

Martin McGuinness

#68. I felt trapped and fabricated in the fifties living up to other people's expectations.

Rosemary Clooney

#69. Mr. Offerman clasps his hand on top of hers. "It's a good hobby for you, dear. It gets you out of the kitchen."
I straighten my spine. Are we in the fifties here? "Out of the kitchen?

Lauren Blakely

#70. When I was growing up - say in the fifties - the thirties to me didn't even exist. I couldn't even imagine them in any kind of way, so I don't expect anyone growing up now is gonna even understand what the sixties were all about, anymore than I could the thirties or twenties.

Bob Dylan

#71. In the fifties there were no paedophiles. There were only simple honest-to-goodness child molesters.

Ian Pattison

#72. I'm known for value for money. I was brought up to be frugal, and it's definitely a factor in my success. I was born in the Fifties, which was a frugal era, and my family had to be very careful with money out of necessity.

John Caudwell

#73. MARRIAGE. The final frontier. Steven went first. He was kind of our test subject. Like those monkeys that NASA sent off into space in the fifties, knowing they'd never make it back alive.

Emma Chase

#74. How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

Mary Augusta Ward

#75. My older brother had a lot of Elvis on vinyl, and really, that was my first introduction to music during the Fifties.

Kiki Dee

#76. I think the music of the Fifties is really good. I suspect it's much better musically than much of what's available now. Not in terms of production, but in terms of content.

Frank Zappa

#77. It's funny, this thing about happiness. It's a commodity that was imported from America in the Fifties. I see myself simply as living my life ... I feel it's pushing your luck to define how happy you are.

Francesca Annis

#78. Every one of Dad's colleagues would eventually commit suicide, most by gunshot to the head, and every woman in their circle except for my mother would become a dysfunctional alcoholic. But in the fifties, they were all riding high.

Tim Gunn

#79. That sounds stupid, but people have to remember that being raised a white male in the U.S.in the fifties and sixties, for most of us, meant being raised stupid.

Stan Goff

#80. If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties
or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.

Julian Barnes

#81. I am especially grateful, however, to have known the fifties, before we began to poison our own civilization - or at least before the effects of the poison began to be felt.

Orson Scott Card

#82. The fifties is a decade when every year is markedly different from the one before and after. That doesn't happen every decade. 1983 isn't that much different from 1986. But 1953 is very different from 1956.

Sara Sheridan

#83. Since I was a kid, I've had an absolute obsession with particular kinds of American music. Mississippi Delta blues of the Thirties, Chicago blues of the Fifties, West Coast music of the mid-Sixties - but I'd never really touched on dark Americana.

Robert Plant

#84. The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting. Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together: the digital computer and the space satellite.

James Gleick

#85. One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.

David Halberstam

#86. Hesse's Journey to the East (1951) in the fifties anticipated the occult revival of the late sixties. But who will interpret for us the amazing success of Rosemary's Baby and 2001? I am merely asking the question.

Mircea Eliade

#87. The only time I've seen any rebellion was in the fifties, sixties and early seventies. The rest of it you can keep.

Lemmy Kilmister

#88. This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

David Foster Wallace

#89. The forties are very cool and very pastoral. The fifties look like they're pastoral, and then you get a bit more turbulence.

Pierce Brosnan

#90. The fifties were when people started coming down on "juvenile delinquents," "hoodlums," "vandals"
anybody that was young, wore a motorcycle jacket, and didn't act polite around older people.

Joe Bob Briggs

#91. Then there was a woman, in her mid-fifties about, who in almost every respect was perfectly normal. But this was the way with these people: in so many respects they were normal, there was just that one thing, that one terrible thing.

Daniel Wallace

#92. Re: Full Disclosure
Sharing with parents all the ways we tricked them as a child is no more amusing to them when we are in our fifties than it would have been had they caught us in the act.

Ron Brackin

#93. Towards the end of his life he became a Liberal of the type common in the forties and fifties.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky

#94. Like the tail fins on fifties American cars or the parabolic shapes of Populuxe furniture, 'West Side Story' incarnates the dream of momentum in the golden age of the twentieth century.

John Lahr

#95. When I was in my early twenties, parts would be written for women in their fifties, and I would get them. And now I'm in my early thirties, and I'm like, 'Why did that 24-year-old get that part?' I was that 24-year-old once. I can't be upset about it; it's the way things are.

Anne Hathaway

#96. What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. 'The Dreamers' was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

Bernardo Bertolucci

#97. I suddenly became aware over the last couple of years that I'm in my sixties. I never thought about it. I thought I'd better start acting my age or find roles that are going to be interesting to me in the sexagenarian repertoire, because it's not what you do in your forties or fifties.

Geoffrey Rush

#98. Everything has its place and time. We men of the nineteen-forties can smile at the mistakes of the nineteen-thirties, and, in turn, the men of the nineteen-fifties will laugh at the mistakes of the nineteen-forties. It is this historical perspective that shall save us.

Lin Yutang

#99. Since the nineteen-fifties, rural Florida has marketed itself to Northerners and Midwesterners as an unexplored paradise of citrus and mermaids.

Anne Hull

#100. Once you reach your fifties, you have to stop being interested in the present and write only on Elizabethan poets.

Umberto Eco