Quotes from The Fifties

“He did not like Europe, which he regarded as a lesser continent, populated with people significantly greedier and more materialistic than Americans. It was a place, he noted, where”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“They cut the menu from twenty-five items to nine, featuring hamburgers and cheeseburgers, and they made the burgers a little smaller—ten hamburgers from one pound of meat instead of eight.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“One reason that Americans as a people became nostalgic about the fifties more than twenty-five years later was not so much that life was better in the fifties (though in some ways it was), but because at the time it had been portrayed so idyllically on television.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“As he found beauty in the hamburger, he thought hot dogs unattractive—both aesthetically and commercially.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“Under enemy-alien status, as his biographer Robert Chadwell Williams has pointed out, he could not own a car or join a British Civil Defense team, but he could in time work on the most secret aspects of atomic physics.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“It requires a certain kind of mind to see the beauty in a hamburger bun.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“She hated that many of her colleagues hid behind the title “Planned Parenthood.” That was a euphemism. “It irks my very soul and all that is Irish in me to acquiesce to the appeasement group that is so prevalent in our beloved organization,” she wrote.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“Anybody is a damn fool if he actually seeks to be President,” he told friends. “You give up four of the very best years of your life. Lord knows it’s a sacrifice. Some people think there is a lot of power and glory attached to the job. On the contrary the very workings of a democratic system see to it that the job has very little power.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“Asked about the role of America’s newspaper publishers, later, when they opposed him editorially, he answered, “Their job is to separate the wheat from the chaff and then print the chaff.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“When his troops reached the rocket camp, they found almost everything of value gone and Stalin was reportedly furious. “This is absolutely intolerable,” he said, according to reliable defectors. “We defeated Nazi armies; we occupied Berlin and Peenemünde, but the Americans got the rocket engineers. What could be more revolting and more inexcusable? How and why was this allowed to happen?” In a way, the Red Army’s race toward Peenemünde was symbolic: It was, without anyone knowing it, the beginning of the race for outer space, or what Winston Churchill once called “the wizard war.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“To a Westerner the anomaly of this—a man under a life sentence for treason working in a prison on the most secret scientific developments—is almost too much to comprehend. In the Soviet Union it was an accepted practice. Korolev was immensely valuable, but because he was so valuable, he was also dangerous. He consented to work because this way, at least, he got some rations, he was with his colleagues, and he was doing what he loved most of all.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“One percent of the population ruled—and they were all grafters—while the other ninety-nine percent live under the worst kind of feudalism.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“Karl Marx, Amaya liked to say, was the last great philosopher of the coal age; his workers were locked into a serflike condition. Had Marx witnessed the industrial explosion of the Oil Century and the rising standard of living it produced among ordinary workers, he might have written differently.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“Advertising,” he wrote, “now compares with such long-standing institutions as the school and the church in the magnitude of its social influence. It dominates the media, it has vast power in the shaping of popular standards and it is really one of the very limited groups of institutions which exercise social control.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“(The Revsons apparently did not like a young psychologist named Joyce Brothers, who appeared as an expert on boxing. Thus the questions given her were exceptionally hard—they even asked her the names of referees—in the desire to get her off the show; their strategy had no effect: She became the second person to win $64,000.)”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“The problem with military policies that are built to domestic specifications and do not take into account the complexity of the real world is that eventually the real world intrudes.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“His body language was that of someone frozen and not yet thawed out.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“Self-righteousness is the inevitable fruit of simple moral judgments.”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

“ingenue whose career was winding down”
― David Halberstam, quote from The Fifties

About the author

Popular quotes

“There was once an invisible man who had grown tired of being unseen. It was not that he was actually invisible. It was that people had become used to not seeing him.

And if no one sees you, are you really there at all?"”
― Patrick Ness, quote from A Monster Calls

“As the end approaches, there are no longer any images from memory - there are only words.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, quote from Collected Fictions

“There was in him a slumbering spark of sociability which the long Starkfield winters had not yet extinguished. By nature grave and inarticulate, he admired recklessness and gaiety in others and was warmed to the marrow by friendly human intercourse.”
― Edith Wharton, quote from Ethan Frome

“He's kissing me. And when he does, part of me is lost. But it's the part that's twisted and mangled and wrong, and for just that moment, with his hands in my hair and his lips on my mouth, I can pretend that it never existed.”
― Katja Millay, quote from The Sea of Tranquility

“We draw our strength from the great oaks of the forest. As they take their nourishment from the soil, and from the rains that feed the soil, so we find our courage in the pattern of living things around us. They stand through storm and tempest. They grow and renew themselves. Like a grove of young oaks, we remain strong.”
― Juliet Marillier, quote from Daughter of the Forest

Interesting books

About BookQuoters

BookQuoters is a community of passionate readers who enjoy sharing the most meaningful, memorable and interesting quotes from great books. As the world communicates more and more via texts, memes and sound bytes, short but profound quotes from books have become more relevant and important. For some of us a quote becomes a mantra, a goal or a philosophy by which we live. For all of us, quotes are a great way to remember a book and to carry with us the author’s best ideas.

We thoughtfully gather quotes from our favorite books, both classic and current, and choose the ones that are most thought-provoking. Each quote represents a book that is interesting, well written and has potential to enhance the reader’s life. We also accept submissions from our visitors and will select the quotes we feel are most appealing to the BookQuoters community.

Founded in 2023, BookQuoters has quickly become a large and vibrant community of people who share an affinity for books. Books are seen by some as a throwback to a previous world; conversely, gleaning the main ideas of a book via a quote or a quick summary is typical of the Information Age but is a habit disdained by some diehard readers. We feel that we have the best of both worlds at BookQuoters; we read books cover-to-cover but offer you some of the highlights. We hope you’ll join us.