Quotes & Sayings About Life In The 1940s

As late as 1920, some 244,000 Civil War veterans were still living, several of whom were in Congress, while Union hero Oliver Wendell Holmes sat on the U.S. Supreme Court. As D. W. Brogan, an astute observer of national trends, would write: "The impact of the Civil War on American life and American memory can hardly be exaggerated. It is still 'the war.'" Brogan expressed this opinion in 1944 - during World War II. Not until the last Union and Confederate veterans died out in the 1940s would the national memory be truly rid of the Civil War. — Douglas Brinkley

And at this very moment, like a miracle, the rail-bus appeared. We waved our arms frantically, hardly daring to hope that it would stop. It did stop. We scrambled thankfully on board.
That is the irony of travel. You spend your boyhood dreaming of a magic, impossibly distant day when you will cross the Equator, when your eyes will behold Quito. And then, in the slow prosaic process of life, that day undramatically dawns - and finds you sleepy, hungry and dull. The Equator is just another valley; you aren't sure which and you don't much care. Quito is just another railroad station, with fuss about baggage and taxis and tips. And the only comforting reality, amidst all this picturesque noisy strangeness, is to find a clean pension run by Czech refugees and sit down in a cozy Central European parlor to a lunch of well-cooked Wiener Schnitzel. — Christopher Isherwood

Humans who see something different than them want to hate it and tear it down. Britain had a government policy that allowed prejudice to destroy someone's life, and today there is still homophobia at home and elsewhere, like Russia or Greece. It's still a relevant discussion. While women have it better than the 1940s or '50s, sexism is still prevalent. — Keira Knightley

In 2013 there were 7,427 poetry readings in April, many on a Thursday. For anyone born in 1928 who pays attention to poetry, the numerousness is astonishing. In April 1948, there were 15 readings in the United States, 12 by Robert Frost. So I claim. The figures are imaginary, but you get the point. — Donald Hall

I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial. — Tom Stoppard

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

In the late 1940s, Saunders had tended to a Jewish refugee from Warsaw dying of cancer in London. The man had left Saunders his life savings - £500 - with a desire to be "a window in [her] home."577 — Siddhartha Mukherjee

I remember my mother taking me to see the Picasso show in the 1940s, and I was impressed by the life and vibrancy of it all. It was a bit too avant-garde for most Londoners at the time, but since then, the city has become a centre for modern culture. — Richard Rogers

The abortion isn't what they(conservative pro-life men of 1940s) are thinking
about; they're really thinking about sex. They're really thinking
about love and reducing it to its most mechanical aspects - that is to
say, the mechanical fact of intercourse as a specific act to make
children in this world, and thinking of its use in any other way as
wrong and wicked. They are determined to reduce women's normal sexual
responses, to end them, really, when we've just had a couple of
decades of admitting them. — Grace Paley

It feels wonderful to be go back to the 1940s and recreate the whole era through my clothes, voice and body language. I am tired of playing the larger-than-life hero. — Akshay Kumar

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

Economic experts tell us that the women of America spend 80 per cent of the national income, and the largest part of this expenditure is made for the necessities and the small luxuries of life. — Judith C. Waller