Fifties Quotes

Where Charlie Christian left off, Papoose started a new thing; he was an innovator of the guitar. The things he did during his recording career with Fats Domino in the Fifties and Sixties until the day he died was as much a part of the music of New Orleans as anybody else has had to offer.

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

I think I’ll be flavor of the month when I’m in my fifties.

I am lucky because I can – and I like to – mix the beautiful Caraceni jackets I inherited from my grandfather with a pair of Tsubi jeans or wear a favorite pin-striped suit from him for more formal occasions. I’m crazy about pinstripes and vintage fifties fabrics.

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.

My style was established in the Forties and Fifties, then got dragged through the decades and picked up a couple more things on the way.

I remember ‘The Norfolk Journal and Guide,’ which is a black newspaper that still exists, but it was really influential, as you can imagine, in the Forties, Fifties, and Sixties. But all of their archives are online and digitized, and it was a really great resource.

In the Fifties, Canvey was a top seaside place for a youngster – the famous Canvey Island Casino was full of slot machines and there were all the fairground rides, such as the dodgems, and a speedway track.

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

‘Doo-wop’ is a very special word for me. Because I grew up listening to my dad who, as a Fifties rock & roll head, loved doo-wop music.

We didn’t get television until quite late, the late fifties, but we had radio, and I can remember listening to the Korean War news on the radio with my family and sensing the anxiety of the adults although not understanding it myself, not understanding exactly what was going on.

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.

That was really the Fifties for me – that whole spirit of flicking the paint on the canvas.

The classic hat image was during the Forties and Fifties, and Elizabeth Taylor was the epitome of that; she was the ultimate celebrity of excess and glamour, and she worked major sun hats.

My influences were the riff-based blues coming from Chicago in the Fifties – Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf and Billy Boy Arnold records.

I came into advertising in 1961. I had been turned down for jobs on the Ford account in the late Fifties as ‘not their type.’ If it hadn’t been for Bill Bernbach, I would now be sitting in some luncheonette, continuing my life as a messenger.

It would have been so awesome to be born in the Thirties and be in your prime in the Fifties. Except for the whole being black thing, obviously!

Here in L.A. the standard of beauty is kind of ridiculous. I want to be doing this when I’m in my fifties and sixties and this isn’t what I’m going to look like.

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

I love that pre-mod jazz look of the late Fifties, the Steve McQueen style that influenced the British modernists.

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.

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.

Lana Turner taught me how to kiss on the set of the movie ‘Diane’ in the early Fifties.

In the Fifties, there were certain places we couldn’t ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in the White House. You have to feel good about it.

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.

Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.

I would compare my ‘Frankenstein’ to Cronenberg’s remake of ‘The Fly.’ The monster in the original Fifties version of ‘The Fly’ was a crude, anatomical combination of man and insect, whereas Cronenberg’s version exploited knowledge of DNA to depict him as a transgenic chimera.

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.

People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.

I’d love to be a NASCAR driver because they’re, like, in their forties and fifties.

Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn’t to say there aren’t entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there’d be no reason for the old. Our life span reflects our particular life strategy.

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.

Let me give you an idea of Fifties Britain. The war had ended ten years before, and most people had returned to their gardens and allotments hoping life would revert to how it was before the hostilities.

When I was growing up in the eighties, there was a real nostalgic streak for the fifties. Look at ‘Back to the Future.’

It sounds so weird, but I’m totally pro-aging. If you look at the film industry, it’s so funny how it’s so much more accepted that actors begin their prime in their forties or fifties, and for women, it’s so different. I think it’s time to change that. Aging is a beautiful thing.

I am a bit sickie happy. I am prone to black clouds too, but… I am embarrassed about them. It’s like: ‘My diamond shoes are too tight. My money clip doesn’t fit all my fifties.’ I mean – really. Shut up.

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.

I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties and remember how unpleasant all kinds of food could be then.

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.

Life is not quantifiable in terms of age, but I suppose in my fifties I am more grounded and more at ease in my own skin than when I was younger. I have a confidence that I didn’t have before from the experiences I’ve had.

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.

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.

Even with Yorkshire I had 19 fifties before I got my first hundred.

When I was still in my psychiatric residency training in New York City, I was subjected to the doctor draft of that time, during the early fifties, at the time of the Korean War.

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.

I’m so lucky to have a career in my fifties. And to still have the desire to do it. I don’t think about retirement.

Listen to the great guitarists of the Fifties. They didn’t do that nasty sort of industrial distortion. They played musical compositions as solos – Scotty Moore, Cliff Gallup, Django Reinhardt. There wasn’t a bad note in any of those solos. I listened to that and stayed with those rules.

Certainly I was a bully. I’m not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society.

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.

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.

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.

Other people get moody in their forties and fifties – men get the male menopause. I missed the whole thing. I was just really happy.

I love oldies just kind of sweet, slinky, Fifties music. The slow stuff. And Billie Holiday.

It wasn’t stone. It wasn’t welded steel. It wasn’t traditional sculpture. They thought it was craft, or something else, but not art. They couldn’t define it in the early Fifties when I was starting out.

I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It’s amazing. They don’t see any stigma attached to it. We don’t need a man to prove our identity anymore.

One of the major demographic shares of people who watch ‘Girls’ are men in their fifties. Fathers watch it, maybe trying to figure out how to keep up with their 20-something daughters.

People in their forties, fifties, and onward enjoy the whole world of books in a different way than the Internet-age kids do.

Even though I loved the Fifties doo-wop, you couldn’t hold on to it. You had to change, or you was gon’ be antique real quick, like the Ink Spots. And then we were at Motown and you had the Rolling Stones, simple rock & roll became the new thing.

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.

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.

The riskiest thing I have done in my fifties is to do a Polish accent for a new film. I had a great time working on it and two wonderful people to guide me. A dialect coach that I have known for thirty years and a Polish actor.

My husband has a cousin who discovered, in his fifties, that the man he thought was his father was actually not, and that he had not only a father he had never met, but brothers.

Some of my ancestors were religious dissenters who came to America over three hundred years ago. Others were abolitionists in New England in the eighteen forties and fifties.

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.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.

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.

In the fact that ‘Vogue’ is someone that can help guide enormous audiences through this fascinating world, I would like to think we are as influential and actually are now reaching so many more people than we ever dreamt of back in the Fifties or the Sixties.

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.

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.

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.

In those years of the Fifties, in London and New York, I lived, without knowing it, in a time when the profoundest changes were happening: when a radical alteration was getting ready to happen in the way a society saw young girls. And, as a consequence, in the way they saw themselves.

I lived through the Fifties in the Midwest when everything that was happening – the repression of homosexuality, for instance, the demonization of the Left, the giggly, soporific ordinariness of adolescence, the stone-deafness to the social injustice all around us – seemed not only unobjectionable but also nonexistent.

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.

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

Part of me has always wanted to be like Marilyn Monroe or any Fifties Hollywood starlet. On screen, they seemed so sexy and simple and looked after. In real life, I’m none of those things. But I’d rather be fierce and complicated.

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.

The creation of Spoleto was a social experiment. Because I’ve always suffered guilt from being a Catholic, when I was in my fifties I felt a need of being needed.

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.

I fought for peace in the fifties.

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

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.

Toward the middle and end of the Fifties, West European countries became somewhat more important as providers of aid to underdeveloped countries. It was partly due to the prodding of the United States that these countries, as they regained economic viability, should shoulder their share of the aid burden.

In New York in the Forties or Fifties, everybody’s in a suit, an overcoat and a hat.

A lot of people like me, who’ve been around for years and years and years, only really lose it in their forties and fifties.

Nobody ever said that growing old would be easy. Just having to hold the newspaper out in your forties and then hair growing out of unusual parts of your body in your fifties. It’s tough on the ego.

When I was at university in the Fifties, Latin America was full of dictators. Trujillo was the emblematic figure because, of course, of his cruelty, corruption, extravagance, and theatricalities.

There are lesbians, God knows… if you came up through lesbian circles in the forties and fifties in New York… who were not feminist and would not call themselves feminists.

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.

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!

Willem de Kooning is generally credited for coming out of the painterly gates strong in the forties, revolutionizing art and abstraction and reaching incredible heights by the early fifties, and then tailing off.

Early on in my career, I used to get out in the 30s, 40s, fifties, and 60s. So I really appreciated reaching my first hundred.