The 1950's Quotes

#1. From the beginning of the presidential nominating conventions in the 1830's really through the 1950's, you had conventions that actually did real business.

Michael Beschloss

#2. The notion of the single man began in the 1950's. The idea of the bachelor as a separate life was new and obscure.

Hugh Hefner

#3. I have a bit of an obsession with the 1950's and all those actors from Montgomery Clift to James Dean and Anthony Perkins. Just that whole era of Tennessee Williams to Elia Kazan.

Sebastian Stan

#4. It might sound naive to suggest that whether you order a chicken patty or a veggie burger is a profoundly important decision. Then again, it certainly would have sounded fantastic if in the 1950's you were told that where you sat in a restaurant or on a bus could begin to uproot racism.

Jonathan Safran Foer

#5. The job of the critic, as it might have been conceived in the 1950's or 1960's, was some kind of role of moral arbiter for people, not a huge number of people, but people who were, you know, fairly educated, well-placed people.

Louis Menand

#6. I grew up in a church-going family, a very sort of ordinary, middle-of-the-road Anglican family where nobody really talked about personal Christian experience. It was just sort of assumed like an awful lot of things in the 1950's were just sort of taken for granted.

N. T. Wright

#7. Sugar Ray Robinson was at the top of the boxing world during the 1950's when it seemed that he would either win or lose the championship about every three or four months.

Dick Schaap

#8. The innocent seriousness with which she told her story and I'd listened to so often and myself told
wide eyed hugging in heaven together
hipsters of America in the 1950's sitting in a dim room
the clash of the streets beyond the window's bare soft sill.

Jack Kerouac

#9. Mao relied on propaganda and education - "Thought Reform," as he called it, which became known colloquially as xinao, or "mind-cleansing." (In 1950, a CIA officer who learned of it coined the term brainwashing.)

Evan Osnos

#10. It is not 2006 all over the world. So who are you in a place where 1950 or 1920 is about to arrive?

Frances Mayes

#11. I started radio in 1950 on the Lone Ranger radio program, a dramatic show that emanated from Detroit when I was 18 years old and just beginning college. I did that for a couple of years.

Casey Kasem

#12. Dr Johnson died in 1944. The suspicion exists that he was silenced ... However two federal inspectors did examine his hospital record in the late 1950's. They concluded it was likely that he was poisoned.

Barry Lynes

#13. The Greatest Living Yankee is Whitey Ford, who came out of Aviation High School, which was then in Manhattan, and helped pitch the Yankees to victory in the 1950 World Series when he was 21.

George Vecsey

#14. I often think of those marvelous weeks spent in the Waddington Range in 1950. 2 new routes on the northern side of the peak and the 3rd ascent of the mountain as well. Waddington is one of the more beautiful peaks in all of Canada and it's only 175 miles north of Vancouver. B.C.!!

Allen Steck

#15. As recently as 1950, the Scottish pathologist John Glaister included in his text the tale of a man "who was apprehended after having been seen to have unnatural intercourse with a duck," leaving us to wonder precisely what natural intercourse with a duck would involve.

E.J. Wagner

#16. Grauman died of heart failure in the spring of 1950, died a bachelor, aged seventy-one, and the only people at his deathbed were his doctor, his secretary for the past twenty-one years, and the publicity chief of 20th Century - Fox. Long

Otto Friedrich

#17. The industrial powerhouse of 1950 [Detroit] is now a crime-ridden wasteland with a functioning literacy rate equivalent to West African basket-cases.

Mark Steyn

#18. In 1945, peace broke out. It was the end of the Joke. Joke warfare was banned at a special session of the Geneva Convention, and in 1950 the last remaining copy of the joke was laid to rest here in the Berkshire countryside, never to be told again.

Graham Chapman

#19. Do you know the nicest thing about looking at pictures of a 1950's baseball park? The only people wearing baseball caps are the players.

George Carlin

#20. In 1950, the [Gallup organization] asked high school kids, are you a very important person? Then 12 percent said yes. Asked again in 2005, 80 percent said, yes, I'm a very important person.

David Brooks

#21. Just because you came here in 1880, 1950, whenever, you became an American. You get to celebrate July 4th like every other American. You don't just get the good part. You get the bad part, too. You get all of it.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#22. It would be a much better country if women did not vote. That is simply a fact. In fact, in every presidential election since 1950 - except Goldwater in '64 - the Republican would have won, if only the men had voted.

Ann Coulter

#23. Ladies and Gentlemen this fellow combines the classic stylings of a 1950's robot with the dynamic flair of a 1970's street pimp ... that's right, boys and girls every where, your friend Pimpbot 5000!

Conan O'Brien

#24. Leaders in China and India realize that science and technology lead to success and wealth. But many countries in the West graduate students into the unemployment line by teaching skills that were necessary to live in 1950.

Michio Kaku

#25. The moment workers can afford too little they rebel. The last time this was a real danger was 1950. Communists took advantage of supply problems and stirred up gullible people against their very own country.

Elfriede Jelinek

#26. I love Topsail Island, which my grandparents helped settle in 1950, despite the racial tensions. I wanted to immortalize my deep connection to this special island forever.

Rolonda Watts

#27. Sunset Boulevard opened in August 1950, and it was pronounced the best movie ever made about Hollywood.

Gloria Swanson

#28. Information is crucial to our biological substance - our genetic code is information. But before 1950, it was not obvious that inheritance had anything to do with code. And it was only after the invention of the telegraph that we understood that our nerves carry messages, just like wires.

James Gleick

#29. The effective combination of the whole English-speaking world in the waging of war and the creation of the Grand Alliance form the conclusion to this part of my account. WINSTON S. CHURCHILL CHARTWELL January 1, 1950

Winston S. Churchill

#30. My doctoral work was completed by the end of 1950 and, at the age of twenty-two, I joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign as an instructor in chemistry under the distinguished chemists Roger Adams and Carl S. Marvel.

Elias James Corey

#31. South Korea first allowed women into the military in 1950 during the Korean War. Back then, female soldiers mainly held administrative and support positions. Women began to take on combat roles in the 1990s when the three military academies, exclusive to men, began accepting women.

Kim Young-ha

#32. On October 7, 1950, the enemy attacked the Tibetan frontier in six places simultaneously.

Heinrich Harrer

#33. I contend that the reason why America is not as happy as it was in 1950 or 1920 or whenever, 100 years ago, is because our priorities are wrong, but it has nothing to do with exploiting the planet and has everything to do with losing faith in God.

Glenn Beck

#34. London's Windmill Theater grew famous for its nude tableaux. During the 1940 and 1950, this theater overcame the objections of censors by agreeing that none of its naked actors would move any part of his/her body.

Lynda Bellingham

#35. I started out as the president of a small college in Minnesota in 1947. And I had five years of experience at the college. Then we went to Los Angeles. And the press got to what we were doing. And I went to Boston, which is my next series of meetings. That was in 1950.

Billy Graham

#36. Each time you toss out a 'singing' greeting card, you are disposing of more computing power than existed in the entire world before 1950.

Paul Saffo

#37. In 1950, the biggest amp you could get was no bigger than a tabletop radio.

Billy Gibbons

#38. My gut feeling is that SF as we know it today is actually a heavily propagandized field that grew out of a specific set of cultural trends running in the USA and Europe between 1918 and 1950, during the post-imperial modernization period.

Charles Stross

#39. The Far East and the Islamic world produced minds as intelligent and curious as those of Europe. However, between 1500 and 1950 they did not produce anything that comes even close to Newtonian physics or Darwinian biology.

Yuval Noah Harari

#40. The Flying Saucers Are Real. New York, N.Y.: Fawcett Publication, Inc., 1950.

Leonard H. Stringfield

#41. Bette Davis, she was so brilliant and one of my heroes, but she worked a ton, and then she didn't get All About Eve [1950] until the last minute. Claudette Colbert was supposed to be Margo Channing, but then she broke her back and couldn't do it. That allowed Davis to play her age.

Winona Ryder

#42. ...but she shook the detective off and her moan revved up into a full-blown 1950's horror film shriek.

Richard Castle

#43. Without the concepts, methods and results found and developed by previous generations right down to Greek antiquity one cannot understand either the aims or achievements of mathematics in the last 50 years. [Said in 1950]

Hermann Weyl

#44. I went to M.I.T. in the summer of 1951 as a 'C.L.E. Moore Instructor.' I had been an instructor at Princeton for one year after obtaining my degree in 1950. It seemed desirable more for personal and social reasons than academic ones to accept the higher-paying instructorship at M.I.T.

John Forbes Nash Jr.

#45. Ironically, this first-day problem for Ulam in 1943 would later become a critical part
of Ulam's work with Cornelius Everett in 1950 in which he demonstrated that Teller's design for the Super bomb was impractical.

Stanislaw M. Ulam

#46. I had a call to the University of Miami where I'd run a revival in 1950.

Howard Finster

#47. Most of the laugh tracks on television were recorded in the early 1950's. These days, most of the people you hear laughing are dead.

Chuck Palahniuk

#48. I had given up ( around 1950, fh) any ambition of making a career as an artist ... ..I had lost all interest in the art shown in galleries and museums, and I no longer aspired to fit in that world. I loved the paintings done by children, and my only desire was to do the same for my own pleasure.

Jean Dubuffet

#49. September 15, 1950, MacArthur launched a brilliantly conceived and executed amphibious landing at Inchon, trapping a large North Korean force after walking ashore several times to ensure a good take for the cameras, his ever-present corncob pipe jutting from his jaw.

Douglas Brinkley

#50. The Internet exposes a diversity of opinion, experience, and taste we'd been led to believe didn't exist. If you were unusual in 1950 or 1980 - and everyone is unusual in one way or another - you were an isolated anomaly. Now you're a Web ring, a Yahoo category.

Virginia Postrel

#51. It is important to demonstrate to the unfree world that one of the privileges of democracies is to enjoy freedom of travel and intercourse and the exchange of knowledge and ideas. [Gerald Barry, from article in English Speaking World, 1950.]

Harriet Atkinson

#52. The big studio era is from the coming of sound until 1950, until I came in ... I came in at a crux in film, which was the end of the studio era and the rise of filmmaking.

Charlton Heston

#53. The first time I went to Fenway Park was probably 1950. It was the early '50s, and it was my father taking me to the game.

Mike Barnicle

#54. I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

William S. Burroughs

#55. That economic decisions are made without certain knowledge of the consequences is pretty self-evident. But, although many economists were aware of this elementary fact, there was no systematic analysis of economic uncertainty until about 1950.

Kenneth Arrow

#56. I started flying because I had a fear of it early on. I figured if I learned to fly, I would understand better what was happening and started taking lessons in the late 1950's, once I had made some money on tour.

Arnold Palmer

#57. By 1950, he had come to view the pedestrian as a threshold or indicator species capable of foretelling things to come - if the rights of the pedestrian were threatened, it would be an early indicator that broader freedoms of thought and action were also at risk.

Jonathan Eller

#58. 'Birdman' is basically 'All About Eve' - the 1950 comedy about rehearsal rivalries in a Broadway show, and another Best Picture laureate - reimagined as a Batman suicide mission. The movie couldn't be actor-ier.

Richard Corliss

#59. The first World Cup I remember was in the 1950 when I was 9 or 10 years old. My father was a soccer player, and there was a big party, and when Brazil lost to Uruguay, I saw my father crying.

Pele

#60. Few people who know of the work of Langley, Lilienthal, Pilcher, Maxim and Chanute but will be inclined to believe that long before the year 2000 A.D., and very probably before 1950, a successful aeroplane will have soared and come home safe and sound.

H.G.Wells

#61. The main motive for "nonattachment" is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work.

George Orwell

#62. between 1950 and 1960 more new office space was added to New York than existed in the rest of the world at the time.

Andrew Cracknell

#63. The amphibious landing of U.S. Marines on September 1950 at Inchon, on the west coast of Korea, was one of the most audacious and spectacularly successful amphibious landings in all naval history.

Bernard Brodie

#64. The great enemy of communication, we find, is the illusion of it. We have talked enough; but we have not listened. And by not listening we have failed to concede the immense complexity of our society - and thus the great gaps between ourselves and those with whom we seek understanding.

William H. Whyte

#65. 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

#66. I predicted in 1950 that in five years, manufacturers the world over would be screaming for protection. It took only four years.

W. Edwards Deming

#67. In 1950 a very large slice of the white South stood at the crossroads in its attitude toward its colored citizens and [was] psychologically capable of turning either way.

Sarah-Patton Boyle

#68. The most important statistic, the one that told the story with the most unbiased clarity, was that the current death rate from cancer was still the same as it was in 1950.

Travis Christofferson

#69. Soviet expansionism in Europe, the battle for control of China, and the 1950 invasion of South Korea would shatter once-euphoric dreams of post-war cooperation with the Kremlin.

M. Stanton Evans

#70. I entered the Physics Department in 1950, receiving a Master's degree in 1953 and a Ph.D. in 1956. It is difficult to convey the sense of excitement that pervaded the Department at that time.

Jerome Isaac Friedman

#71. I am predominantly critical concerning the activities, and especially the political activities, through history of the official clergy.

Albert Einstein

#72. In 1950 the European Union was officially born in the form of a German-dominated cartel of coal and steel, run of course by a cross-border French-dominated administration located in Brussels. Its name? The European Steel and Coal Community.

Yanis Varoufakis

#73. I'd like to play with a period piece. Playing a girl next door in 2010 is so different from playing one in 1950, the way you talk, walk, dress, relationships. It's really fun studying all that.

Emilie De Ravin

#74. Between 1910 and 1950 approximately 350 lives of Jesus were published in the English language alone.

John Clayton

#75. Between 1950 and 1951, I worked as a temporary employee in the Cologne Bureau of Statistics. From summer 1951 on, I have lived as a freelance writer with a fixed postal address in Cologne but with a continually shifting place of work.

Heinrich Boll

#76. The world is coming to an end in 1950.

Henry Adams

#77. President David O. McKay declared: "No greater immediate responsibility rests upon members of the Church, upon all citizens of this Republic and of neighboring Republics than to protect the freedom vouchsafed by the Constitution of the United States." (Conference Report, April 1950, p. 37.)

Ezra Taft Benson

#78. I grew up in Harlem, a block away from what was then the most crowded block in New York City, according to the 1950 census. Something like ten thousand people lived in one city block.

Samuel R. Delany

#79. At my parents' house, I recently found a 1950 black-and-white snapshot of a chubby bespectacled warrior holding a three-and-a-half-foot freshly killed rattlesnake. The boy's smile is ecstatic.

Martin E.P. Seligman

#80. From 1950 to 2000, the U.S. economy grew at an average rate of 3.5 percent. That generated a massive gain in real GDP per person from $16,000 to over $50,000. A huge win for the middle class.

Lawrence Kudlow

#81. Eroom's law - that's Moore's law backward - observes that the number of new drugs approved per billion dollars spent on R&D has halved every nine years since 1950. Since

Peter Thiel

#82. In 1950, when the Giants signed me, they gave me $15,000. I bought a 1950 Mercury. I couldn't drive, but I had it in the parking lot there, and everybody that could drive would drive the car. So it was like a community thing.

Willie Mays

#83. I was born in Paris in 1950. I had a strict upper-class Catholic education but I never really fitted in the system and revolted against it quite early.

Francois Gautier