Quotessence
Home / Topics / 1950s Quotes

1950s Quotes

Browse 35 quotes about 1950s.

1950s Quotes

“Men are supposed to protect their women from harm and the harsh, evil world. But what is a girl to do when the evil inhabits her own home? When the depraved monster forces her to spread her legs and take him inside like a meek, compliant wife, and beats her when she doesn’t? She plans a murder, that’s what she does.”

EmpowermentRevengeDark RomanceStrong Female Characters1950sRevenge Story
Book:Bloody Fingers & Red Lipstick
Create image

“Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliché (as well as a tundra of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliché upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.”

PoliticsHistoryHumourCommitmentPoliceLoyaltyRussiaCommunismGenerosityIronyBoredomCharmMediocrityBureaucracyExileDissentTotalitarianismAllegianceMoscowArgumentsDetention1968KafkaGorbachevCzechoslovakiaArrestNelson MandelaPrague1950s1970s1980sCliches1988Vaclav HavelBad CrowdsCharter 77Zdenek Mlynar
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
Create image

“They asked me to tell you what it was like to be twenty and pregnant in 1950 and when you tell your boyfriend you’re pregnant, he tells you about a friend of his in the army whose girl told him she was pregnant, so he got all his buddies to come and say, “We all fucked her, so who knows who the father is?” And he laughs at the good joke…. What was it like, if you were planning to go to graduate school and get a degree and earn a living so you could support yourself and do the work you loved—what it was like to be a senior at Radcliffe and pregnant and if you bore this child, this child which the law demanded you bear and would then call “unlawful,” “illegitimate,” this child whose father denied it … What was it like? […] It’s like this: if I had dropped out of college, thrown away my education, depended on my parents … if I had done all that, which is what the anti-abortion people want me to have done, I would have borne a child for them, … the authorities, the theorists, the fundamentalists; I would have born a child for them, their child. But I would not have born my own first child, or second child, or third child. My children. The life of that fetus would have prevented, would have aborted, three other fetuses … the three wanted children, the three I had with my husband—whom, if I had not aborted the unwanted one, I would never have met … I would have been an “unwed mother” of a three-year-old in California, without work, with half an education, living off her parents…. But it is the children I have to come back to, my children Elisabeth, Caroline, Theodore, my joy, my pride, my loves. If I had not broken the law and aborted that life nobody wanted, they would have been aborted by a cruel, bigoted, and senseless law. They would never have been born. This thought I cannot bear. What was it like, in the Dark Ages when abortion was a crime, for the girl whose dad couldn’t borrow cash, as my dad could? What was it like for the girl who couldn’t even tell her dad, because he would go crazy with shame and rage? Who couldn’t tell her mother? Who had to go alone to that filthy room and put herself body and soul into the hands of a professional criminal? – because that is what every doctor who did an abortion was, whether he was an extortionist or an idealist. You know what it was like for her. You know and I know; that is why we are here. We are not going back to the Dark Ages. We are not going to let anybody in this country have that kind of power over any girl or woman. There are great powers, outside the government and in it, trying to legislate the return of darkness. We are not great powers. But we are the light. Nobody can put us out. May all of you shine very bright and steady, today and always.”

FeminismAbortionSexismWomens Rights1950s
Author:Ursula K. Le Guin
Create image

“When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.”

LoveStoriesSexAdventureRacismShipsSexismUnrequited LoveNavySegregationCubaProstitutionOld DaysHomophobiaShort StoriesRite Of PassageHavanaSavannahShort Story Collection1950sHigh SeasDeep SouthPolitical IntrigueAdolescent Angst
Book:Once upon a Decade: Tales of the Fifties
Create image

“Currents of cigarette fumes wafted through what passed for air. Attractive young women in bright-hued gowns glided through the streams of smoke, like tropical fish in an aquarium. Detecting the white uniforms and leathery faces, they promptly approached the Navy men. Very pretty, Ed thought, but hungry, a school of piranha. Just what the doctor ordered: fun and games with no complications. Right: no complications.”

LoveSexAdventureCubaHavana1950s
Book:Once upon a Decade: Tales of the Fifties
Create image

“Without even looking at me as he continued to read, holding the book in one hand, he had slipped his other hand through the fly of my Levi denims and was playing with my cock. Though shocked at my discovery, the sensations were so good that I dared not move. As soon as he realized that my eyes were open he lowered the book, turned to me, and smiled. “Good afternoon,” he said very politely, pretending that absolutely nothing was amiss or irregular. “Hello,” I gurgled, not quite believing but thoroughly enjoying what was happening. I wanted to ask him his name but before I could say anything he gently tightened his grip around my throbbing member and made me come.”

SexHollywoodHomosexuality1950sDegeneracyPublic SexFaggotrySex In The ParkSexscapadeSleeping Sex
Book:Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars
Create image

“Disneyland was one perfect answer. It provided, an almost sacred space where it is permissible and safe to let one's guard down, take a risk, rediscover imagination, have fun, express emotion, play and deepen family ties. This is powerful stuff even today, in our nation of workaholics and two-working-parent households, and it was certainly powerful in the anxious 1950's.”

DisneylandDisneyFamily Ties1950sWorkaholics
Book:The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014 - Disneyland: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Place on Earth
Create image

“It's not a real place, or a place that you can stay for long; it's a somewhere-over-the-rainbow archetype but rooted in genuine emotions. No matter what Guests' care might be, when they step onto Main Street they enter an evocation of the ideal home town. This is, in a sense, the 'home' to which Dorothy Gale wanted to return. Main Street welcomes all Guests with warmth as comforting today as it was to the post-war society of the 1950's for which it was originally created.”

DisneylandDisneyMain Street1950sMain Street Usa
Book:The Disneyland Book of Secrets 2014 - Disneyland: One Local's Unauthorized, Rapturous and Indispensable Guide to the Happiest Place on Earth
Create image

“Perhaps the suspicions stemmed from the distinct lack of women in Batman’s world. True, he crafted his Bruce Wayne alter ego to be an idle playboy, which meant there were a lot of beautiful women in his life. But, the most important female figure in his world seemed only to be his sainted, slain mother, to whose memory, along with that of his late father, Bruce swore to uphold justice and thwart evil. Bruce and Batman might have had romances with girls like debutante Julie Madison or reporter Vicki Vale, but showed neither any true affection. The one female who generated the most heat with Batman was the seductive, whip-wielding jewel thief Catwoman. Of course, since she was on the wrong side of the law, any chance of a romance with Batman was immediately crushed. (...) Batman’s sexy foe Catwoman was deemed too racy for the new world of the Comics Code. She was gone by 1954.”

ComicsBatman1950sCatwoman1940s
Book:Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines
Create image

“The country is like a great sponge—it finally absorbs you. Eventually you will get malaria or you will get dysentery and whatever you do, if you don't keep doing it, the jungle will grow over you. Black or white, you've got to fight it every minute of the day.”

AfricaCongo1950s1951
Book:The Making of The African Queen Or How I went to Africa with Bogart, Bacall and Huston and almost lost my mind
Create image

“If one word applied to that post-war decade it was inertia. Enthusiasm there was not, in this climate of fatigue. Jimmy Porter was hurt because things had remained the same. Colonel Redfern grieved that everything had changed. They were both wrong, but that was hard to see at the time.”

1950sAngry Young ManPostwarLook Back In AngerPostwar BritainJimmy Porter
Book:Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise
Create image

“He treats me like his property. But it’s all fine. I have my ways to escape from the prison he designed for me. He likes his girls proper and innocent. Oh, hubby dearest. You haven’t a clue in the world. You’re going to regret underestimating me. While he’s deep in dreamland, I have other things on my mind. Blood. Revenge. Murder. At night is when I unleash all of my vulgar thoughts on paper. At night is when my fantasies come alive. At night is when I write.”

MurderAuthorWriterDark RomanceHousewife1950sRevenge StorySerial Killer Romance
Book:Bloody Fingers & Red Lipstick
Create image

“In the 1950s, America had picked up the globe by the heels and shaken the change from its pockets. Europe had become a poor cousin -- all crests and no table settings. And the indistinguishable countries of Africa, Asia, and South America had just begun skittering across our schoolroom walls like salamanders in the sun. True, the Communists were out there, somewhere, but with Joe McCarthy in the grave and no one on the Moon, for the time being the Russians just skulked across the pages of spy novels.”

1950sWorld CultureEra Of Change
Book:Rules of Civility
Create image

“We wives are emotional beings. Clothes play an important role in emotional control. If you go to work knowing you look wonderful, feeling at ease, comfortable, and appropriately garbed, you're bound to be more alert and more able to cope with problems, including the unexpected. Getting the habit of dressing well every day will prevent panic at an unexpected situation at work, or after work for that mattter.”

FashionDressing UpPersonal StyleWell Dressed1950sDressing YourselfWomen S FashionAnne Forgarty Wife DressingOffice Attire
Book:Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife
Create image

“(Charles) Laughton was one of the most pugnaciously morose men I had ever met. His huge talent seemed to endorse his implacable resentment. His Caliban self-portraiture must have been further agnozied by being incarcerated, like so many of his unhappy generation, in that closet which dared not speak its name. Even his large collection of Klees and Kokoshchkas was displayed as trophies of martyrdom rather than joyful plunder.”

ActorsGayHomosexualityAutobiographyMorose1950sIn The ClosetCharles Laughton
Book:Looking Back: Never Explain, Never Apologise
Create image

“If you give small, informal dinner parties, have a few long or short colorful skirts and dresses in jersey or flannel with gay party aprons to make your role of hostess festive yet comfortable. If your husband's work means continuous parties, conventions, and entertainment, pep up your collection of after-five clothes with satin pumps in different colors.”

FashionStyle1950sAnne FogartyWife DressingStyle QuotesHousewiferyHomemakers
Book:Wife Dressing: The Fine Art of Being a Well-Dressed Wife
Create image