The 60s Quotes

When I was a kid, like four or five years old, I was obsessed with the 'Batman' TV show in the '60s. And I took it totally seriously. At that age, I took it completely seriously. I didn't get the fact that it was kind of played for laughs. I didn't understand why my mom was rolling her eyes or chuckling. ~ Lee Bermejo

I was in college for two years, and just hated it in the '60s. ~ Kurt Loder

The end of the '60s was a terrible time. I was in Los Angeles then, and I remember the night someone ran into the studio and told us about the Manson murders. Then suddenly something happened, the '60s disappeared. The '70s were completely different. ~ Claes Oldenburg

I don't remember most of the '60s and '70s. ~ Jerry Della Femina

I think part of why schizophrenia got linked to civil rights protest in the '60s was because mainstream society was coding threats against the smooth running of the state as insanity and treating it as such, and so as that happens you see the evolution of a process in which people with schizophrenia are increasingly feared and our hospitals, particularly the kind of hospital that I look at in the book become to look more and more like prisons, to the point where many of them including the one I talk about actually become prisons. ~ Jonathan Michel Metzl

We blacks had problems in the '60s and we solved them by marching. We've still got problems - let's march. ~ Al Sharpton

I wish people didn't just think of me in the '60s. I'm not any era. ~ Marianne Faithfull

Coming out of the '60s and the Vietnam War in America, it was commonplace for people to make films that had relevance to them. And since the '70s, cinema has gone almost entirely in the direction of spectacle and escapism and superhero films. ~ Dan Gilroy

I have this threadbare caftan from the '60s that I got at a vintage store years ago - it's basically a muumuu. My friends are astonished that I wear it, but I love it. It's this light fabric that just moves with me. ~ Gabrielle Anwar

I'm a child of the '60s, I came of age then. I went to a couple of demonstrations, and then in the late '60s when the Vietnam anti-war movement grew as the Vietnam War was heating up, I became very involved in that. ~ Simi Linton

Let's make my birthday, July the 7th at noon, Peace and Love Day. Everybody go, 'Peace and love.' In the office, on the bus, wherever. It's still peace and love for me, I'm a product of the 60s and it was a very influential period in my life, and you know, my head was turned around a bit, my eyes were opened as it were. In fact, I even have it on my arm, 'Peace and love'. I see nothing wrong with peace and love. ~ Ringo Starr

Music was such an important part of everyone's life in the '60s and '70s, but everywhere you played, the music was dreadful. ~ Peter Hook

The problem with hanging on to the '60s is that everyone thought they would go on forever. ~ Grace Slick

We film 'Resurrection' in Atlanta, where humidity is a force to be reckoned with, especially for those of us who have naturally curly hair. I would love for the au naturel look of the '60s to come back. No make up, no hair products - just sun-kissed skin, freckles, and crazy curls. ~ Devin Kelley

North American leftists just keep trying to relive the '60s, or to make the '60s happen again. ~ Dave Sim

I like "God Give Me the Strength" very much. It's not really a blues and to call it a ballad is absurd. I don't know, its mid-tempo. Mark (St. John) actually wrote it and I think its very telling of our lives in the 60s. Its just a good song, ya know ... ~ Dick Taylor

In the '60s, I used to love rock magazines; I'd cut out pictures of Bob Dylan and John Lennon. ~ Patti Smith

If you go to Japan, they're still buying vinyl, and they want the education. They know who's playing on what tracks from the '60s and the '70s - who the guitar player is, who the drummer is, who the producer was, what studio it was recorded in. That's how I grew up listening to music. We bought albums. We read the liner notes. It was important to know the whole history behind it. ~ Lenny Kravitz

During the 60's, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement. ~ Joe Biden

In the '50s, women aspired to dress like their mothers - this polished, controlled, formal way of dressing. Then all of a sudden in the '60s, going into the '70s, they stopped dressing like their mothers. ~ Robin Givhan

With the '60s era and Motown, my grandparents actually introduced us to that when I was younger, so I grew up listening to the Jackson Five, Aretha Franklin, The Temptations, The Supremes and Diana Ross' solo stuff. I just loved it. ~ Jordin Sparks

I do think that our culture or our psyche as a country I guess, the world or whatever, we're due for a huge event. We're due for a little bit of a revolution or a spotlight or a movement. Something that feels large, something that feels like the 60s. Some sort of unification. ~ Justin Vernon

It's not that parents love their children less than in generations past. It's that they no longer receive consistent societal support for the belief that parenting is their highest priority ... TV messages championed rather then detracted from wholesome ideals ... maybe "the old days" before the societal changes of the '60s weren't perfect, but they allowed a bevy of family-friendly forces to surround parents with encouragement for their mission ... ~ Diane Medved

My guitar heroes are Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck and people like that - so I've tried to make an album of Robert Johnson covers that, well, while not totally faithful for blues purists, is faithful for people like me that grew up with the '60s and the electric blues-rock versions of Johnson's songs. ~ Todd Rundgren

One of the most unfortunate side effects of the urban activism of the '60s and '70s is the belief that development is wrong and that fighting it makes you an environmentalist. ~ Alex Steffen

The '60s were a very turbulent time for colored people. Being away at war was a chance for them to escape the racial bullshit for a while. It was a shame it came down to that kind of choice.
Don't get me wrong. There were plenty of guys, who tried to bring that racial crap over there with them. However, when the shit hits the fan, you don't give a damn about who's standing next to you, saving your ass. You certainly don't care what color his skin is or what language he speaks. All that matters to you is that he is an American G.I. Government Issued, baby! ~ Jason Medina

My star was kind of fading towards the end of the '60s and suddenly I got this call from Fellini, who just appeared to kind of love me! ~ Terence Stamp

I wish I had devoted all of my time writing to literature.
Those essays in the 60's, they were insolent, you know, like a young persons work. I wouldn't mind if the essays, at some point, evaporated.
I think fiction .. I think literature .. I think narrative, is what lasts.
I do believe that there is such a thing as truth. But I prefer the mode in which truth appears in art or literature. In literature a truth is something who's opposite is also true. ~ Susan Sontag

It's funny, but to me, when you go to a concert hall and hear electronic pieces from the '60s, I think they sound really dated. But when an orchestra plays a piece from that period, and it's going to sound different every time, it feels more modern to me. ~ Jonny Greenwood

Pink Floyd in The 60s.
Piper at The Gates of Dawn (1967)
Singles and B-sides, outtakes
A Saucerful of Secrets
More
Ummagumma
Zabriskie Point (recorded Dec. 69)
Pretty damned impressive! ~ Sienna McQuillen

You have to remember this was the '60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe. ~ Yvon Chouinard

The 90's are the 60's standing on their head. ~ Wavy Gravy

I've always been interested in space and the idea of exploration in that area since I was a child growing up through the '60s. ~ Sarah Brightman

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. ~ Robert Klein

We came from the '60s era, when we started and made so many hits. The song value from the '60s was so darn good, you've got The Beatles, The Beach Boys, all of Motown, and plenty of other people, too ... amazing records, amazing songs. ~ Mike Love

Back in the 60s, San Francisco artists lived in communes. ~ Gedde Watanabe

I think the '60s were an extraordinary time. I feel bad for the kids today who missed this wonderful confluence, which was simultaneously a confluence of the global and the mythological. ~ Peter Coyote

In the early part of the '60s I was influenced by the Ventures. ~ Carl Wilson

I spent most of the '60s, when I was starting to try to write novels, living and working in Greece and Turkey. These are countries where the ancient past is interfused with the daily present, and I remember being struck with wonder at the constant sense of continuity and connection, the reminders that lie in wait for you at every turn. ~ Barry Unsworth

In the '60s, I was teaching humanities at a college in upstate New York and trying to publish a novel I'd written in graduate school. But nothing was happening. So I moved to New York City and got a job as a messenger at a place that made movies. ~ Wes Craven

The title 'Now He Sings, Now He Sobs' comes from 'I Ching,' an ancient Chinese book that I was into in the '60s when I was studying different philosophies and religions. ~ Chick Corea

And yes, there are things I want to keep, that I like around me - especially when there's very little left. I just want to keep those little bits of reminders of my past. There are certain drawings from the '60s; certain little paintings from the '60s that I keep. ~ Robert Barry

A lot of advertising has gotten worse. I think it's kind of lost its nerve, to be honest with you. I feel like the advertising of the '60s, they were nervier. You know why? Because there was less at stake. ~ Jerry Seinfeld

I'm influenced by the music of the '60s. It's a mishmash of everything. To me, psychedelic can be all the way to a DJ. House music can be very psychedelic. Flying Lotus is very psychedelic. Even though it's urban and technological, it's also mind-expanding, anything-can-go mishmash. ~ Anton Newcombe

I lived in France during the '60s. I was there from the early '60s until 1970, so my view of the '60s is more global. It was a time of tremendous transition, not only for America but for the whole world. ~ Jane Fonda

The post-68 left has tended to overvalue the negative capability of remaining in doubt, scepticism and uncertainties - this may be an aesthetic virtue, but it is a political vice. The self-doubt that has been endemic on the left since the 60s is little in evidence on the right – one reason that the right has been so successful in imposing its programme. Many on the left now quail at the thought of formulating a programme, still less "imposing" one. But we have to give up on the belief that people will spontaneously turn to the left, or that neoliberalism will collapse without our actively dismantling it. ~ Mark Fisher

Similar to computer technology in the '60s, 3-D printing is a universal technology that has the potential to revolutionize our life by enabling individuals to design and manufacture things. ~ Hod Lipson

That strain of anti-monopoly crusading egalitarianism really runs throughout American history from [Tomas] Jefferson to Woodrow Wilson, that finds its apotheosis in [Louis] Brandeis, continues through the New Deal, but then it sort of peters out in the '60s because progressives in particular become more interested in extending equality to minorities, and women, and other excluded groups, and little more suspicious of these old white guys, often from the south, who were crusaders against monopolies. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

I came along in the '60s having absorbed as much as I could up until then and added my own tastes and search into the equation. I guess that's how I see 'Now He Sings, Now He Sobs' in relation to the development of jazz in general. ~ Chick Corea

A lot of my favourite American writers are from the 1930s to the 60s. James Agee, Joseph Mitchell, AJ Liebling, Meyer Berger: they relied on their intuitions, didn't follow any who-what-where rules of reporting, frequently portrayed a contrary viewpoint. They all over-identified with their subjects. There's never the slightest pretence of objectivity. ~ Luc Sante

There was about a two-year period at the end of the '60s, when I realized I was in the wrong place and entertaining the wrong people with the wrong material and that I was not being true to myself. I went through a metamorphosis into something more authentic for me, a more authentic stage voice and writing voice. ~ George Carlin

My style is cinematic; it is a touch of French woman of the '60s and American hippie with a Brooklyn edge. I love wearing wide-brim hats, newsboy caps, mini dresses and sheer blouses with details. ~ Wynter Gordon

A respectable-sized audience hasn't really been able to follow developments in jazz since the free jazz movement in the '60s. Some of them can't even get with John Coltrane. Audiences are diminishing more and more rapidly. Some of the top young musicians with something new to say can't get record companies to put out their stuff. ~ Harvey Pekar

The Beach Boys have always been a part of the '60s spectrum, with The Beatles and that kind of thing. They were a part of the music business like everyone else. And they did quite well as a singing group, and I finished a lot of good records, and I'm very proud of them. ~ Brian Wilson

The Beatles, the Small Faces and the Kinks were great bands, but that was in the '60s. ~ Gavin Rossdale

Here at Wisconsin we didn't get an undergraduate course in mathematical logic until the '60s. ~ Stephen Cole Kleene

I was never a 'bad' kid, but I did get into minor juvenile trouble. Look, I grew up in Brooklyn. This was the '60s, and the neighborhood was rapidly changing and not without its problems. All the kids of the neighborhood 'did their thing,' breaking windows and the like. I was no different. ~ William Forsythe

Oh, I haven't reached any peak. I hit the bottom in the '60s. When a certain actress undertook the leading role in a recent play of mine, she referred to me as "that old derelict." Not to my face, but behind my back. ~ Tennessee Williams

I was a working-class kid from Boston. But I never lost my accent because I felt like that was what I was doing. I didn't have to perform Woody Guthrie like Bob Dylan did in the '60s, I just had to make myself be Eileen Myles and let that be my shield. ~ Eileen Myles

It began to really eat away with me that in the '60s the federal government, desiring to help poor moms who were dealing with deadbeat dads, decided, 'We'll help: we'll give a check for every child you can have out of wedlock.' ~ Louie Gohmert

I grew up in the '60s, which was a creative time, so it wasn't that big of a stretch to go from a baseball bat to a guitar to a film camera. ~ Abel Ferrara

I started buying bits of broken porcelain. I furnished our first flat with pieces of 'junk.' Some of that 'junk' is now worth an awful lot of money. What I was calling 'junk' in the '60s people wouldn't call 'junk' now. ~ Judith Miller

The-one of the odd things that's going on with smoking these days is that in the '90s, smoking at movies in the '90s, there were more movies showing smoking than there were in the '60s. ~ Joe Eszterhas

When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia
which was inappropriate, certainly that ... to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people, ~ Eric Holder

My only problem with fans is when they turn pro. For example, when all the professional writers were fired by DC in the '60s, they brought in a generation of comic book fans who would have paid to have written these stories. ~ Alan Moore

I honed in on a great time, the Motown era, the '60s and '70s. That type of music has always been a staple in my life. ~ Raphael Saadiq

With all due respect to the people who made the motorcycle movies during the '60s, I felt the sophistication level could be a bit higher, and I felt I could raise the bar on that, too. ~ Larry Bishop

Feminism is the best thing to come out of the '60's. ~ Marianne Faithfull

Bob Dylan's first couple of records in the 60's weren't considered cover records, but he only wrote one or two original songs on each album. ~ John Mellencamp

The '60s was a time of unthinkabilities. ~ Mike Love

In the '60s and '70s, people didn't pay a lot of attention to gangs. I think gangs still existed, but gangs had fallen out of criminological favor. ~ Meda Chesney-Lind

I know my hair is out of the '60's, my clothes are '50's and the shoes I wear are from the '40's. But I like looking like I came out of a fairy tale. ~ Dolly Parton

I was in college in the '60s, and the whole feminist movement had swept me up. ~ Laura Schlessinger

I was born in the late '50s, was a child of the '60s, then the '70s, then the '80s, then the '90s, and I have mental fingers in all those pies. ~ Jello Biafra

The '60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a society like India's, which is not fully modern or totally organized, and has a great deal of tolerance for otherness in general, people find the cultural license to try other things, to be whatever they want to be. ~ Pankaj Mishra

In the 60s, political correctness became not a guideline for living, but a new set of shackles. A small and vocal part of the Black community lost sight of the fact that unity does not mean unanimity - Black people are not some standardly digestible quantity. In order to work together we do not have to become a mix of indistinguishable particles resembling a vat of homogenized chocolate milk. ~ Audre Lorde

I am one of the graduates of the William Morris famous, famous mail room from the '60s. ~ Irwin Winkler

Athol Fugard became famous as a playwright, so although 'Tsotsi' the book was written in the '60s, it was only published in the '80s. It was then optioned pretty much every year by producers. I think the problem was that holding onto its period setting made it very hard to get finance. ~ Gavin Hood

Cobb was in a Klan group back in the 60's, and told me stories about how they used to throw live 'coons, possums, porcupines, or ganders into Black houses at night in attempts to run them out of Johnston and Harnett County. Cobb said that late one night, he and three or four other local rednecks snuck up on the house of one Black family, peered through the window and saw a huge Black woman sitting in front of a TV watching Gunsmoke, with a gang of children all around her.
The window was open and Cobb threw a live possum in her lap. Cobb said she squalled about the loudest and longest he'd ever heard, and jumped about four feet up in the air. Cobb then ran and jumped into a nearby ditch to observe what would happen next, and it wasn't long before they saw the Black woman bust out of the back door and run across a cotton field with a trail of children behind. Cobb said she was as wide as three rows of cotton, but fast and agile. She outran all the young'uns. ~ Frazier Glenn Miller

India brings out so many different feelings in me. I've been fascinated with India and Indian culture as long as I can remember - ever since the '60s with the Beatles and Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. ~ Joe Perry

I do three weeks at the Hall of Justice Jail. It's a potent crime primer. I'm the geek that all the pro thugs disdain. I observe them up close. It's the '60s. It's social-grievance-as-justification-for-bad-actions time. My cellmates have sadness raps down. I gain a notch on my crime-as-continuing-circumstance notion. Crime is large-scale individual moral default.

That means you, motherfucker. ~ James Ellroy

What I really like investigating in my novels: what is it that makes an intimate society, that makes a society in which moral concern for others will be possible? Part of that I think are manners and ritual. We tried to get rid of manners, we tried to abolish manners in the '60s. Manners were very, very old-fashioned and un-cool. And of course we didn't realise that manners are the building blocks of proper moral relationships between people. ~ Alexander McCall Smith

I know, when I look into the eyes of my own children, the look of wonder when I speak of life back in the '60s. That's why the Rolling Stones are such a hit even in their 60s, why Dennis Hopper is so compelling, even when he's making pitches for something unhip as long-term financial planning. ~ Chris Matthews

I guess Pumas are in their 30s. Cougars in their 40s ... Jaguars are 50s, and Sabretooths go into the 60s, right? ~ Courteney Cox

Hopefully, we can learn from the 60s that we cannot afford to do our enemies work by destroying each other. ~ Audre Lorde

I talk about beepers going off in the middle of a concert and people being late and not apologizing, and people not RSVP-ing, and adult children going back to live with their parents, which we didn't have in the '60s and '70s. ~ Letitia Baldrige

Spirit is love, spirit is connection, inclusive, and that's what I'm interested in, and that's what moved me. That's what I got more and more into as I grew up and as I was in college in the 60's with consciousness raising and other kind of things, gestalt psychology etc. ~ Surya Das

I tend to lean more towards the Westerns of the 40s and 50s as opposed to the 60s and 70s. They get a little too drab for me when you get into the Spaghetti Western era. I love the John Ford movies. I love the music. I love the scope. ~ Seth MacFarlane

The 60's has its own particular style and I think setting film in a period enables you to create your own reality that the audience can escape into and have fun, and in a way make it more real than it actually is. ~ Lionel Wigram

I wish I lived in the '60s because I'm a big fan of the Beatles. ~ Celine Buckens

At this stage of the game, I don't have the time for patience and tolerance. Ten years ago, even five years ago, I would have listened to people ask their questions, explained to them, mollified them. No more. That time is past. Now, as Norman Mailer said in Naked and the Dead, 'I hate everything which is not in myself.' If it doesn't have a direct bearing on what I'm advocating, if it doesn't augment or stimulate my life and thinking, I don't want to hear it. It has to add something to my life. There's no more time for explaining and being ecumenical anymore. No more time. That's a characteristic I share with the new generation of Satanists, which might best be termed, and has labeled itself in many ways, an 'Apocalypse culture.' Not that they believe in the biblical Apocalypse - the ultimate war between good and evil. Quite the contrary. But that there is an urgency, a need to get on with things and stop wailing and if it ends tomorrow, at least we'll know we've lived today. It's a 'fiddle while Rome burns' philosophy. It's the Satanic philosophy. If the generation born in the 50's grew up in the shadow of The Bomb and had to assimilate the possibility of imminent self destruction of the entire planet at any time, those born in the 60's have had to reconcile the inevitability of our own destruction, not through the bomb but through mindless, uncontrolled overpopulation. And somehow resolve in themselves, looking at what history has taught us, that no amount of yelling, prot ~ Anton Szandor LaVey

The violence that we had in the 60's was limited. The next time it will be unlimited because the violence in the 60's was a struggle for human dignity and for human rights. The next struggle will be a struggle for survival and it will not just be limited to Black people or Black against white, but it will be the poor people, the masses of the people of the country, struggling for the right to live or the right to survive. ~ Robert F. Williams

Nothing has really changed. We had bootleg albums in the '60s and today we have Internet file sharing. They just found a better way to do it
get music for free. What's great about today is an artist has an opportunity to go direct to their audience without dealing with a middleman. People can go directly to the web for CDs, DVDs and downloads. I think that's the best thing that's happened, that people's music is being flashed around the world. ~ Richie Havens

I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels. ~ John Cale

My crystal ball or intuition tells me that in the '80s the impact of RIA [radioimmunoassay] on the study of infectious diseases may prove as revolutionary as its impact on endocrinology in the 60s. ~ Rosalyn Sussman Yalow

I've been performing since the 60s and I made my first album in 1969, so it's been a bit over twenty years. ~ Thelma Houston

It wasn't that expectations changed. But [teens] went from general expectations of success to having no idea of the right thing to do. In the '60s there was a strong prejudice against careerism. We were self-indulgent and self-destructive. ~ Michael Medved

When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today. ~ Gus Van Sant

Artists have really never had any representation on Capitol Hill, because it's not the nature of the artist to join together and make a unified presence. Those days kind of died in the '60s. ~ Sheryl Crow

When people talk about the '60s I never think that was me there. It was me and I was in it, but I was never enamoured with all that. It's supposed to be sex and drugs and rock and roll and I'm not really like that. I've never really seen the Rolling Stones as anything. ~ Charlie Watts