1950s Culture Quotes

When I was growing up in the 1950s, sweaters were a huge thing.

I loved New York in the '50s.

I was obsessed with New York early on. I was watching sitcoms that were set in or around New York, like 'The Dick Van Dyke Show.' I was always very fascinated with the people who were on 'What's My Line?' and I always had an incredible obsession with the city.

Back in the Sinatra era, you called women "broads," and the broads didn't mind. If Sinatra called you a broad, you were flattered. When Sinatra walked in, and you know what you did? You ran up and you tried to kiss him. Who hasn't seen women throwing their underwear at the Beatles and this kind of thing?

The fifties were when people started coming down on "juvenile delinquents," "hoodlums," "vandals"--anybody that was young, wore a motorcycle jacket, and didn't act polite around older people.

50s cheesecake meets Eskimo fake fur.

I love '50s music, all that stuff from the '50s.

And I found both literature and the church very dramatic presences in the world of the 1950s.

The whole 1950s notion was find the right girl, get married, move to the suburbs and then hang out with the guys while she stayed home with the babies. I felt that was sort of sad.

Rock n' roll! It's the music of puberty.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

To be quite honest, my fans growing up were my friends' parents. Like, 30-plus was, like, 'Mad Men' age group.

Growing up in the 1950s, in Grand Rapids, Michigan, boys were supposed to be athletic.

I grew up in the 1950s and '60s, when it was almost a holiday when a black act would go on Ed Sullivan.

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.

Family dinner in the Norman Rockwell mode had taken hold by the 1950s: Mom cooked, Dad carved, son cleared, daughter did the dishes.

When I was a young kid, girls were taught that their role in life was to get married and have children. It was the 1950s. Those were the rules.

The words 'Space Age' have a quaint, nostalgic tone - sitting on midcentury modern furniture watching 'The Jetsons.'

I've always heard that women secretly want their father. So I used to walk around in a 1950s business suit, with a hat and a pipe. My opening line would be, 'You should be getting to bed now.'

I grew up in a church-going family, a very sort of ordinary, middle-of-the-road Anglican family where nobody really talked about personal Christian experience. It was just sort of assumed like an awful lot of things in the 1950's were just sort of taken for granted.

I've always been impelled to say the truth. When I was 14, in 1954, I already wrote a gay novel, though I'd never read one. I felt that life handed me a great subject, gay life, that had scarcely been examined, and I was impelled to record it in all its strange detail.

Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker seemed so sophisticated and bad. I wanted to be like that.

In the 1950s and 1960s, many parents were generally standoffish with their male children and acted as if they were raising a generation of would-be soldiers. I remember some of my friends' parents who would shake their children's hands at bedtime.

My mama was a rocker way back in fifty-three, buys them old records that they sell on TV.

In 1955 music wasn't that important. Music was a kind of a special thing you went and did.