Life In The 1930s Quotes & Sayings

You take my breath. Did you know that?"
Matt bit his lip and shook his head.
Kiernan leaned back enough to look into his eyes. "You're a beautiful man, Matthew Bennett," he said, voice soft but intense as he stroked him more firmly. "And someone should tell you that, every day for the rest of your life. — Diana Copland

The gross domestic product (GDP) was created in the 1930s to measure the value of the sum total of economic goods and services generated over a single year. The problem with the index is that it counts negative as well as positive economic activity. If a country invests large sums of money in armaments, builds prisons, expands police security, and has to clean up polluted environments and the like, it's included in the GDP. Simon Kuznets, an American who invented the GDP measurement tool, pointed out early on that "[t]he welfare of a nation can . . . scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income."28 Later in life, Kuznets became even more emphatic about the drawbacks of relying on the GDP as a gauge of economic prosperity. He warned that "[d]istinctions must be kept in mind between quantity and quality of growth . . . . Goals for 'more' growth should specify more growth of what and for what."29 — Jeremy Rifkin

She thought of the Good Shepherd with His sheep. Of the Man hanging upon the cross. And the understanding bubbled up within her soul: He makes all things new. — Alicia G. Ruggieri

For the creation of the mechanicals was a seismic event, an earth-rending convulsion that left nothing untouched: palaces, thrones, and empires, yes, but also the way men and women thought about themselves and their relationship to the world, to God, even their own bodies. — Ian Tregillis

Phones were created as social tools. Smartphones are especially good at being social, integrating text, voice, video and images in an endless number of apps that can serve a user's needs, and all without the need for a web-based social network. — Keith Teare

Our arrogance
causes us to imagine special value in this temporary collection
of molecules. Why do we perceive more spiritual value
in the sum of our body parts than on any individual cell in
our body? Why don't we hold funerals when skin cells die? — Scott Adams

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

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

It amazes me how many people love being unhappy. — James Rhodes

There's been more written about Lincoln than movies made about him or television portraying him. He's kind of a stranger to our industry, to this medium. You have to go back to the 1930s to find a movie that's just about Abraham Lincoln. I just found that my fascination with Lincoln, which started as a child, got to the point where after reading so much about him I thought there was a chance to tell a segment of his life to to moviegoers. — Steven Spielberg

We have learned that the things we amassed to prove to ourselves how valuable, how important, how successful we were, didn't prove it at all. In fact, they have very little to do with it. It's what's inside of us, not what's outside of us that counts. — Joan D. Chittister

It was a great challenge to reconstruct Gypsy Rose Lee life, and my interviews with her sister [June Havoc] proved invaluable. It's not often that writers have access to living primary source material; this was the only person who experienced life on the vaudeville circuit with Gypsy during the 1920s, and who saw her perform at Minsky's Burlesque in the 1930s. She knew things that no one else could ever possibly know. — Karen Abbott

Georges Claude made a fortune from his neon signs, but lost most of it in the 1930s with hair brained schemes to make electricity using the temperature difference between the top of the ocean and its icy depths. He almost ended his career imprisoned for life. — Bill Hammack

Take hold of kettle, broom, and pan, then you'll surely get a man! Shop and office leave alone, Your true life's work lies at home. - COMMON GERMAN RHYME OF THE 1930S — David R. Gillham

When you look at my life, you can go back to the late 1930s, what I saw was, first of all, Hitler, he was going to live forever. Mussolini was in for 10,000 years. You had the Soviet Union, which was, by definition, going to last forever. There was the British empire
nobody imagined it could come to an end. So why should one believe in any kind of permanence? — Doris Lessing

For however inhospitable the wind, from this vantage point Manhattan was simply so improbable, so wonderful, so obviously full of promise - that you wanted to approach it for the rest of your life without ever quite arriving. — Amor Towles

This is a perfect snapshot of the West at twilight. On the one hand, governments of developed nations microregulate every aspect of your life in the interests of 'keeping you safe.' ... On the other hand, when it comes to 'keeping you safe' from real threats, such as a millenarian theocracy that claims universal jurisdiction, America and its allies do nothing ... It is now certain that Tehran will get its nukes, and very soon. This is the biggest abdication of responsibility by the Western powers since the 1930s. — Mark Steyn

Well, I've spent a lot of time in your libraries at night," said Ripred.
"You come up and read books?" asked Gregor.
"Read them, eat them, whatever mood strikes me," he said. — Suzanne Collins

If you cannot explain it simply, you do not understand it enough. — Albert Einstein

Miyata was fluent and intelligent. Nothing was beyond his curiosity. He seemed to be above the confusion of life, as if he had been commissioned to spend his own in undisturbed judgement of the world about him, protected always by a mandate from the gods. They spoke briefly of Korea and then of the past war with the United States. Miyata had been in Japan for its entire duration and must have been deeply affected, but when he talked about it, it was without bitterness. Wars were not of his doing. He considered them almost poetically, as if they were seasons, the cruel winters of man, even though almost all the work he had done in the 1930s and early 1940s had been lost when his house was burned in the great incendiary raid of 1944. He described the night vividly, the endless hours, the bombers thundering low over the storms of fire. — James Salter