Quotes & Sayings About 1950s Life
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Top 1950s Life Quotes

What Friedan gave to the world was, "the problem that has no name." She not only named it but dissected it. The advances of science, the development of labor-saving appliances, the development of the suburbs: all had come together to offer women in the 1950s a life their mothers had scarcely dreamed of, free from rampant disease, onerous drudgery, noxious city streets. But the green lawns and big corner lots were isolating, the housework seemed to expand to fill the time available, and polio and smallpox were replaced by depression and alcoholism. All that was covered up in a kitchen conspiracy of denial ...
[i]nstead the problem was with the mystique of waxed floors and perfectly applied lipstick. — Betty Friedan

Yes. Yes, when we live our life like 1950s detective films. I often go to my fridge, "Hullo, we're out of milk. I say mother, where's the milk?" — Bill Bailey

As a child growing up in San Francisco in the 1950s, I sometimes met insults when I ventured outside of Chinatown or my neighborhood. I have even been spat on and threatened with a knife. I could have let my anger fester until it became hate. However, I realized they were isolated incidents, and I simply got on with my life. — Laurence Yep

When J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy was published in the 1950s, a woman named Rhona Beare wrote Tolkien and asked him about the chapter in which the Ring of Power is destroyed in the fires of Mount Doom. When the ring is melted, the Dark Lord's entire power collapses and melts away with it. She found it inexplicable that this unassailable, overwhelming power would be wiped out by the erasure of such a little object. Tolkien replied that at the heart of the plot was the Dark Lord's effort to magnify and maximize his power by placing so much of it in the ring. He wrote: "The Ring of Sauron is only one of the various mythical treatments of the placing of one's life, or power, in some external object, which is thus exposed to capture or destruction with disastrous results to oneself. — Timothy J. Keller

The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past. — Stephanie Coontz

In 1951, the Columbia University sociologist C. Wright Mills published a study titled White Collar: The American Middle Classes.26 Like Ronald Coase, Mills was fascinated by the rise of large managerial corporations. He argued that these firms, in their pursuit of scale and efficiency, had created a vast tier of workers who carried out repetitive, mechanistic tasks that stifled their imagination and, ultimately, their ability to fully participate in society. In short, Mills argued, the typical corporate worker was alienated. For many, that alienation was captured in the warning printed on the Hollerith punch cards that, thanks to IBM and other data processing firms, became ubiquitous symbols and agents of bureaucratized life during the 1950s and 1960s: "Do Not Fold, Spindle, or Mutilate. — Moises Naim

And still you make fun," Tomassz complains, "after I am saving your life. Again. So tell me please, your inntricate knowledge of Polish references. Yes, that would be most amusing. Long, long talk now about Polish language and the words Polish people use to feel in picturesque language."
"Where did you learn English? The 1950s? — Patrick Ness

The character at the center of Whyte's wonderful psychodrama was 'the well-rounded man.' The well-rounded man was the ideal 1950s type. Whyte wrote his book in part as an argument against the well-rounded man. He believed that when society exalted the well-rounded it punished the truly talented: the scientists, the artists, the musicians, the engineers, the people who came at life from surprising new directions. — Michael Lewis

In Breaking Clean, Judy Blunt looks back on her childhood and early married life in the 1950s and '60s on cattle ranches in northeastern Montana, and explores what it meant to be female in that place and time. — Nancy Pearl

During the Great Depression, levels of crime actually dropped. During the 1920s, when life was free and easy, so was crime. During the 1930s, when the entire American economy fell into a government-owned alligator moat, crime was nearly non-existent. During the 1950s and 1960s, when the economy was excellent, crime rose again. — Ben Shapiro

"This compound should be available from most good drugstores." I got increasingly annoyed with this phrase because in the world I lived in, even ordinary soap was available only intermittently ... In an economy that operated by central planning, shortages of just about everything were commonplace." the author dexcribing life in Hungary in the 1950s under Communist Russian rule. — Andrew S. Grove

In the 1930s, Americans hopped trains. In the 1950s, beat poets wrote about road trips. In the 1960s, we hitched rides. Today, however, it seems like the whole "coming of age" adventure has been abridged from a young person's life experience, leaving no gap, no bridge, no moment of real freedom in between school and career. I — Ken Ilgunas

There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward ... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff. — Arthur Ashe

In the 1940s and 1950s, the study of natural history
an intimate science predicated on the time-consuming collection and naming of life-forms
gave way to microbiology, theoretical and commercial. Much the same thing happened to the conservation movement, which shifted from local preservationists with soil on their shoes to environmental lawyers in Washington, D.C. — Richard Louv

It wasn't fair, he thought. The world of pro sports was stuck in a time warp, still in the 1950s as far as sexuality went, even as the rest of the country, save for small pockets of deliberately cultivated ignorance, moved on, got over it. What kind of life are we going to have? Brian thought. Then he laughed at the thought of himself as a football wife, hanging out with the other wives and working on a charity cookbook. "What? — Brad Vance

As a kid growing up in the 1950s I became acutely aware of the changes taking place in American culture and I must say I didn't much like it. I witnessed the debasement of architecture, and I could see a decline in the quality of things like comic books and toys, things made for kids. Old things seemed to have more life, more substance, more humanity in them. — Robert Crumb

Although much has been written of the exploits of Canadians who answered the call to arms in World Wars I and II, nothing has been written about the young men who flocked to join the Cold War. Thanks to Canada's menacing presence, Russia has never invaded Germany.
The author menaced Russia, as a fighter pilot based in NATO Europe during the 1950s. Much of the material herein is derived from his diaries of that period. Some names have been changed to protect the guilty. Accounts have been embellished. No harm or libel is intended. The harm is to the author's self-image. The diaries reveal that he was brash and intolerant. He considers it one of life's miracles that his friends put up with him. — R.J. Childerhose

Everything we did in the 1960s was designed to fission, to weaken faith in and conformity to the 1950s social order. Our precise surgical target was the Judeo-Christian power monolith, which has imposed a guilty, inhibited, grim, anti-body, anti-life repression on Western civilization. — Timothy Leary

Life in Christ is not meant to mirror life in a Greco-Roman culture. An ancient Middle Eastern culture is not our standard. We are not meant to adopt the world of Luther's Reformation or the culture of the eighteenth-century Great Awakening or even 1950s America as our standard for righteousness. The culture, past or present, isn't the point: Jesus and his Kingdom come, his will done, right now - that is the point. — Sarah Bessey

It's like our go-to notion of innocent and secure mythology of American life. I was always amazed when people would come up to me and say that 'Far from Heaven' was exactly what it was like back then. [laughs] I was so disinterested in what it was 'really like' in the 1950s when I was putting the film together, I was only interested in what it was like in movies. — Todd Haynes

As far as the physical miseries go, I am sure I will cope. I lived at Eton in the 1950s and I know all about life in uncomfortable quarters. — Jonathan Aitken

They knew that life was a struggle, and though the odds were a bit longer for people like them, that fact didn't excuse failure. "Never be like these fucking losers who think the deck is stacked against them," my grandma often told me. "You can do anything you want to." Their community shared this faith, and in the 1950s that faith appeared well founded. — J.D. Vance

If you want to write something of length, however modern and radical, you must live the life of an elderly gentleman of the 1950s. — Arthur Smith

I grew up in conservative rural Kansas in the 1950s when it was expected that girls would not have a life outside the home, so educating them was a waste of time. — Sara Paretsky

Between 18 and 19 years old [in the 1950s] I came to Paris. I studied art. And that experience really did change my life. I was living hand to mouth. I walked everywhere. I thought, this city is incredible but you really have to experience it by walking it. — Robert Redford

Eventually, my highbrow parents, who so hated the Eisenhower suburban culture of the 1950s that the only magazines they subscribed to were 'The Atlantic' and 'The New Yorker,' broke down and got 'Life' magazine. — Sally Mann

...Alas, Babylon was to be among the first to give a public voice to the fears and anxieties associated with a nuclear attack and with threats of atomic radiation. And unlike others in the genre, he offered unmitigated hope. Randy Bragg and company not only survive the devastation that leaves vast Contaminated Zones throughout the United States, but they also apply the best in themselves to begin the re-establishment of life within a civil society. All of the atomic fears of the 1950s (and later) are there, but Frank's 'message' seems to be that we can survive even the worst catastrophe with everyday, secularized applications of faith, hope, and charity. — Hal Hager

I loved my kids. And I loved my house, and I loved a lot of things about my life in the 1950s. But there were a lot like me in that era, very overeducated housewives. — Betty Friedan

Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions? — Douglas Coupland

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis. — LeRoy Neiman