Edmund White Quotes

To some, the '50s were a decade marked by the banal, the predictable.

America before the 1960s was a pretty innocent place. We were the Lone Ranger galloping off to the rescue of the needy and the oppressed of the world, and we could get things done.

The '50s were a secretive time.

The nineteen fifties was a time of tumultuous change.

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

I was born in 1953, so that's the Eisenhower administration.

I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.

When I was a kid in the '50s, during the Eisenhower years, everything seemed to be working fine. I don't recall as a teenager ever worrying about the state of the future world.

Some people think of the '50s as a time of innocence, but they are misremembering it or reinventing it: if you look at the papers of the time, they are filled with dread and anxiety.

I am a product of the 1950s.

People who, like me, grew up in the 1950s and 1960s after World War II, grew up with cars.

We were postwar middle-class white kids living in the slipstream of the greatest per-capita rise in income in the history of Western civilization; we were 'teen-agers' - a term, coined in 1941, that was in common usage a decade later - a new, recognizable franchise. We had money, mobility, and problems all our own.

The '50s and the '70s are sort of similar in that they're both times of major paranoia in America.

People talk about the '60s, but they were merely a mass production of what the '50s had begun.

The '50s sucked for a lot of people on Earth.

Some people would like the world to go back to the 1950s.

I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.

There have been two periods in my lifetime when the excitement of government and of public issues drew to Washington many of the bright young people graduating from colleges and law schools. These were essentially the Roosevelt and the Kennedy years.

My generation had the best years. We missed the Second World War and caught the outburst of rock 'n' roll.

Certainly I think the election of John Kennedy and all he stood for was one that really was an inspiration.

I'm a product of the Kennedy era. Kennedy's Inaugural plus the accident of Dean Rusk brought me into the government. Those were my values.

I think that I recall the nostalgic '50s: the start of early television and rock-and-roll, and I think everything seemed to get very generic. Not much has changed.

Kennedy is remembered as a success mainly because of what came after: Johnson and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate.

The '50s were terrifying with nuclear bomb stuff but boring in a social way, and then the '60s were happening, and remember, there was no AIDS.

I came to political consciousness with John F. Kennedy's magnificent 1961 Inaugural Address. It seemed the start of something fresh and exciting, and it was.