The Sixties Quotes

The sixties are like a theme park to them. They wear the costume, buy their tickets, and they have the experience. ~ Douglas Coupland

There is a lot of sixties-bashing going on these days that I don't agree with at all. I feel that extremely important ideals were brought to the forefront of the collective consciousness at that time. Granted, drug use was so pervasive that our generation did not as a group have the capacity to manifest our ideals to any great extent. But many of the people who were young in the sixties and who were most touched by that collective ethos are still touched. ~ Marianne Williamson

I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all trailed off after the Sixties. ~ Paul Merton

You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how 'creative', 'idealistic', and 'loving' it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the 'herd of the independent minds'. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for 'love' was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence. ~ Roger Kimball

In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn't know anyone unknown who didn't become famous. ~ Michael Caine

But, you know, the Stones were my opening act in the Sixties. I loved those British guys, the way they just stood there and shook their hair. ~ Ronnie Spector

Barbecue brings people together, it always did and always will. Even in the sixties, during the race movements, barbecue was one of the things that held down the tensions. At a barbecue, it didn't matter who you were. ~ Michael Pollan

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire. ~ Dave Barry

I don't regret what I did in the Sixties. I was young and took myself terribly seriously. In the Seventies, I spent too much time in inner-party factional disputes. ~ Tariq Ali

As everyone else, I was a fan of Pink Floyd in the sixties. ~ Klaus Schulze

Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let's remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War. ~ Ann Druyan

The American Type Culture Collection - a nonprofit whose funds go mainly toward maintaining and providing pure cultures for science - has been selling HeLa since the sixties. When this book went to press, their price per vial was $256. The ATCC won't reveal how much money it brings in from HeLa sales each year, but since HeLa is one of the most popular cell lines in the world, that number is surely significant. ~ Rebecca Skloot

There's not that many people from the sixties who have progressed as writers and are continuing on. They're out there. But I'm one of them who's just continued on, following his own little inner madness. ~ Creed Bratton

American family life has never been particularly idyllic. In the nineteenth century, nearly a quarter of all children experienced the death of one of their parents ... Not until the sixties did the chief cause of separation of parents shift from death to divorce. ~ Richard Louv

Alan Scheflin reports on some of the children who received stereotaxic surgery in the sixties and seventies. He lists several doctors who performed such surgery on children because they suffered from behavioral problems such as "wandering." One young boy would sneak away from his home and crawl underneath an automobile in order to smell the oil. Two groups were as young as two and four years old when surgery took place for "violent behavior. ~ Carol Rutz

Put football instead of cricket and she could have been me. She could have been Arwa, or Deena or any of the girls I grew up with here in Cairo in the Sixties. What difference do a hundred years - or a continent - make? ~ Ahdaf Soueif

There weren't a lot of people kind of manning the barricades in the sixties and looking up their genealogy. ~ Sean Wilsey

The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas. ~ David Bailey

He had a ponytail. But this was not a regular ponytail from the Sixties, not a ponytail for show or for fashion. It was more. It was a personal ponytail, something more defining and lasting. A personal thing is different, and all the books and all the magazines in the world can't tell you what that is. ~ Alberto Alvaro Rios

The American 'unum' has been lost since the Sixties. If this continues, there will soon be no unifying American identity and vision to balance the 'pluribus,' and the days of the Republic will be numbered. ~ Os Guinness

In the Sixties, conglomerates were all the rage. ~ Jim Pattison

I am inclined to put the zenith of success-the time of most consideration and public labor -as somewhere in the sixties, say from sixty-five to seventy. ~ William Robertson Nicoll

The queers of the sixties, like those since, have connived with their repression under a veneer of respectability. Good mannered city queens in suits and pinstripes, so busy establishing themselves, were useless at changing anything. ~ Derek Jarman

Have they built cities on the moon?" another boy asked hopefully.
"We left some garbage and a flag there in the sixties, but thats about it. ~ Ransom Riggs

In the sixties, during the Vietnam war, when anarchists and pacifists and socialists, Democrats and Republicans, decent-hearted Americans, all recoiled with horror at the bloodbath, we came together. ~ Pete Seeger

Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday?"
I roll my eyes. "I don't know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback."
"I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party." He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. "And I'm not even going to ask how you know about acid flashbacks."
"What's an acid flashback?" Izzy crows.
"Nothing," my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me. ~ Lauren Oliver

Androgynous fashion, long hair, the Pill, a new interest in the inner psychological life - an unabashed sloppiness, if you will - really marks the sixties. It was when Britain went girlie. And what do girls do? Girls shop. ~ Andrew Marr

The Sixties was all about style and a certain look. But what was interesting about 1963 was that it was pre-Beatles, so the clothes of that time, especially the suits, were very different from the clothes post-Beatlemania. ~ Luke Evans

I understand the mechanism of my own thinking. I know precisely how I know, and my understanding is recursive. I understand the infinite regress of this self-knowing, not by proceeding step by step endlessly, but by apprehending the limit. The nature of recursive cognition is clear to me. A new meaning of the term "self-aware."

Fiat logos. I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

With this language, I can see how my mind is operating. I don't pretend to see my own neurons firing; such claims belong to John Lilly and his LSD experiments of the sixties. What I can do is perceive the gestalts; I see the mental structures forming, interacting. I see myself thinking, and I see the equations that describe my thinking, and I see myself comprehending the equations, and I see how the equations describe their being comprehended.

I know how they make up my thoughts.

These thoughts. ~ Ted Chiang

Middle Age connotes fat, cancer, bad musical taste, and death. It conjures up a commuter in the sixties going to a Neil Simon play in Sansabelt pants, a knit vest, balding, belly sagging - and then there's the men. ~ Marilyn Suzanne Miller

I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London. ~ Marianne Faithfull

He met her on 26 December 1969, five days before the end of the sixties, when he was twenty-two and she was twenty-one. ~ Salman Rushdie

You got two black folk representing us through the Sixties. One of them was for violence, one was against it, and they both are dead. ~ Snoop Dogg

A survey of more than three hundred international policymakers found that 90 per cent of them still believed that personal motivation – aka willpower – was a very strong cause of obesity.6 This is absurd.
It makes no sense to presume that there has been a sudden collapse in willpower across all ages and ethnic groups and each sex since the 1960s. What has changed most since the sixties is not our collective willpower but the marketing and availability of energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods. ~ Bee Wilson

The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations went off at sundown. Then you picked up Chicago and heard the teenage music you really yearned for. ~ Charles Frazier

I don't buy the whole mythology of the sixties. I think I'm an intergenerational person. ~ Bill Ayers

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal. ~ John Lennon

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services. ~ John Le Carre

People who weren't fans of the actress didn't understand that through much of the sixties, Doris Day played independent women, characters who owned their own businesses, ran households, and often didn't need a man. The irony was, she usually ended up with a pretty good one: Rock Hudson, James Garner, and Cary Grant, to name a few. ~ Diane Vallere

There are four warring interests in spaceflight: ambitiousness of vision, urgency of timetable, reduction of cost, and safety to astronauts. These can never be entirely reconciled. In the sixties, urgency and ambitiousness were the driving factors, and because this was understood and accepted, the massive cost and risk were accepted as well. We now seem to be at a moment when reduction of cost is paramount, with safety coming in a very close second. This being the case, we should not be surprised that ambitiousness and urgency have had to be set aside altogether. But it's ludicrous to claim, as I often hear people do, that "NASA has lost its vision." NASA has lost support, not vision. Wernher ~ Margaret Lazarus Dean

You can see where it's going. The extraordinary political apathy that followed Watergate and Vietnam and the institutionalization of grass-roots rebellion among minorities will only deepen. Politics is about consensus, and the advertising legacy of the sixties is that consensus is repression. Voting'll be unhip: Americans now vote with their wallets. Government's only cultural role will be as the tyrannical parent we both hate and need. Look for us to elect someone who can cast himself as a Rebel, maybe even a cowboy, but who deep down we'll know is a bureaucratic creature who'll operate inside the government mechanism instead of naively bang his head against it the way we've watched poor Jimmy do for four years. ~ David Foster Wallace

The people who invented the twenty-first century were pot-smoking, sandal-wearing hippies from the West Coast like Steve, because they saw differently," he said. "The hierarchical systems of the East Coast, England, Germany, and Japan do not encourage this different thinking. The sixties produced an anarchic mind-set that is great for imagining a world not yet in existence. ~ Walter Isaacson

The music I like best is kind of frozen in my mind from the Sixties and Seventies. I still listen to the same jazz music I listened to when I was eighteen years old, and like and admire it just as much. ~ Don DeLillo

I always knew the Sixties wasn't a revolution. It really was just a bunch of university students with wealthy parents having fun. ~ John Lydon

CUSTOMER: I read a book in the sixties. I don't remember the author, or the title. But it was green, and it made me laugh. Do you know which one I mean? ~ Jen Campbell

In Don Mills in the Sixties, nothing comes close to the humiliation of losing an argument. In our weird little creative circle, no one cares who has faster fists, but to lose an argument suggests inferior intelligence. ~ Dan Hill

I had other priorities in the sixties than military service. ~ Dick Cheney

Every movement that slays its gods creates new ones, of course. I loathe talk of the sixties and seventies being a 'Greatest Generation' of artists, but if we're going to use such idiotic appellations, let this one also be applied to the artists, curators, and gallerists who emerged in the first half of the nineties. ~ Jerry Saltz

I think The Doors are one of the classic groups, and I think we're all tempted to feel like the time in which we grew up was somehow special, but I really do believe that there were two golden eras in music: The Forties and Fifties of big band, jazz and swing, and the Sixties and Seventies of rock. To me, they're really unparalleled. ~ Edgar Winter

A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldn't have happened without the social changes. ~ Steve Winwood

When we were kids, growing up in the sixties, the only images we had of ourselves were either still photographs or 8mm movies ... Now we have video, digital cameras, MP3s, and a million other ways to document ourselves. But the still photograph continues to hold a sense of mystery and awe to me. ~ Catherine Opie

I feel that the social revolution of the sixties is like a revolving door that came our way, and then left. It's back again. ~ Marianne Williamson

In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery. It is only in a summer camp (College or the hippie commune) that the enlightened live on the American Plan - room and board included prepaid - and one is free to frolic all day in the unspoiled woods. ~ David Mamet

In the Sixties, the hippies used to say, "Never trust anyone over 30." Now all the Sixties hippies are in their sixties, and they've gone quiet about that, but it's good advice for you: never trust anyone over 30 with the societal checkbook. You thought you were the idealistic youth of the Obama era, but in fact you're the designated fall-guys. You weren't voting for "the future," but to deny yourself the very possibility of one--like turkeys volunteering to waddle around with an "Audacity of Thanksgiving" bumper sticker on your tush. Instead of swaying glassy-eyed behind President Obama at his campaign rallies singing "We are the hopeychange," you should have been demanding that the government spend less money on small agencies with fewer employees on smaller salaries. Because if you don't, there won't be a future. "You can be anything you want to be"--but only if you first tell today's big spenders that, whatever they want to be, they should try doing it on their own dime. ~ Mark Steyn

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship. ~ John Lennon

On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with. ~ Ellen Willis

I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community built during the sixties. During the early years, it was very integrated. I grew up being taught by black teachers with black principals and vice principals and, you know, a lot of black friends. We played in mixed groups, and I kind of thought that was how it was. ~ Michael Chabon

At Woodstock, we would focus our energy on peace, setting aside the onstage discussion of political issues to just groove on what might be possible. It was a chance to see if we could create the kind of world for which we'd been striving throughout the sixties: That would be our political statement - proving that peace and understanding were possible and creating a testament to the value of the counterculture.
It would be three days of peace and music. ~ Uwe Michael Lang

I realize that people still read books now and some people actually love them, but in 1946 in the Village our feelings about books--I'm talking about my friends and myself--went beyond love. It was as if we didn't know where we ended and books began. Books were our weather, our environment, our clothing. We didn't simply read books; we became them. We took them into ourselves and made them into our histories. While it would be easy to say that we escaped into books, it might be truer to say that books escaped into us. Books were to us what drugs were to young men in the sixties.

They showed us what was possible. We had been living with whatever was close at hand, whatever was given, and books took us great distances. We had known only domestic emotions and they showed us what happens to emotions when they are homeless. Books gave us balance--the young are so unbalanced that anything can make them fall. Books steadied us; it was as if we carried a heavy bag of them in each hand and they kept us level. They gave us gravity. ~ Anatole Broyard

Give my book The Sixties Girl a read. You'll love it. You'll laugh, cry and find yourself wanting more. ~ Victoria Staat

As a young man just beginning to publish some short fiction in the t&a magazines, I was fairly optimistic about my chances of getting published; I knew that I had some game, as the basketball players say these days, and I also felt that time was on my side; sooner or later the best-selling writers of the sixties and seventies would either die or go senile, making room for newcomers like me. ~ Stephen King

Would this make sense to the TV audience? That a thing like a protest expands and draws everything into it. He wants to tell his audience that the reality they are seeing on television is not Reality. Imagine a single drop of water: that's the protest. Now put that drop of water into a bucket: that's the protest movement. Now drop that bucket into Lake Michigan: that's Reality. But old Cronkite knows the danger of television is that people begin seeing the entire world through that single drop of water. How that one drop refracts the light becomes the whole picture. For many people, whatever they see tonight will cement in place everything they think about protest and peace and the sixties. And he feels, pressingly, that it's his job to prevent this closure. ~ Nathan Hill

The Beats are crucial to an understanding of America's cultural revolution not least because in their lives, their proclamations, and (for lack of a more accurate term) their 'work' they anticipated so many of the pathologies of the Sixties and Seventies. Their programmatic anti-Americanism, their avid celebration of drug abuse, their squalid, promiscuous sex lives, their pseudo-spirituality, their attack on rationality and their degradation of intellectual standards, their aggressive narcissism and juvenile political posturing: in all this and more, the Beats were every bit as 'advanced' as any Sixties radical. ~ Roger Kimball

[People] are beginning to awaken to an idea we gave meaning to in the sixties: We are one people, one family, the human family, and what affects one of us affects us all. ~ John Lewis

The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions. ~ Audre Lorde

Remember when you used to watch TV in the Sixties and you'd see Perry Como in a cashmere sweater? That's what rock 'n' roll is becoming. It's your parents' music. ~ Neil Young

I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we're doing is not that. But it's partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around. ~ Bernadine Dohrn

I have a rotary phone from the sixties, it take forever to dial, which keeps me from making impulsive calls. ~ Natalie Standiford

The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions. ~ Henry A. Kissinger

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period - the Sixties - I rejected those things when I went north. ~ Bobbie Ann Mason

Too many younger artists, critics, and curators are fetishizing the sixties, transforming the period into a deformed cult, a fantasy religion, a hip brand, and a crippling disease. ~ Jerry Saltz

It was such an amazing time for music in the Sixties. When popular music hit me, it was like magic was in the air. ~ Ozzy Osbourne

Manson's the man who's responsible for "killing the Sixties." He really knew how to play up the whole "most dangerous man alive" thing when at the time, the most dangerous man alive was Richard Nixon. ~ John Roecker

I first came to Brazil in the Sixties. Then I started coming back every year since touring most of the country. I grew to love it, the people, the music. I thought this is where I belong. I've been living in Brazil for the past 23 years. I call it my stress-free country. ~ Dionne Warwick

Had Ken Kesey opened Electric Kool-Aid stands on every college campus in the country, it would have made a lesser contribution than Life to the creation of that era of unprecedented foment we like to call the sixties. ~ Tom Robbins

In the sixties, for anybody to suggest that the government didn't have our best interests at heart and policemen sometimes killed people would have automatically made them a radical firebrand lefty. That's not the case anymore. ~ Alan Moore

It was Jefferson, not some liberal judge in the sixties, who called for a wall between church and state - and if we have declined to heed Jefferson's advice to engage in a revolution every two or three generations, it's only because the Constitution itself proved a sufficient defense against tyranny. ~ Barack Obama

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses. ~ Camille Paglia

In the sixties and seventies you could probably name all the great comics. It was still special. ~ Marc Maron

1974 was a crazy, hazy time for Alan Partridge. The Sixties had come to East Anglia and it was a time of free thinking, free love and in my case free university accommodation. ~ Alan Partridge

The great background question about the Labour governments of the sixties is whether with a stronger leader they could have gripped the country's big problems and dealt with them. How did it happen that a cabinet of such brilliant, such clever and self-confident people achieved so little? In part, it was the effect of the whirling court politics demonstrated by 'In Place of Strife'. ~ Andrew Marr

He strolled through the store to the back room.
Leah sat at a desk, staring at a computer screen that displayed a spreadsheet of some sort. "Give me two minutes," she mumbled, her tone distracted, "then I'll be done."
Seth leaned against the wall and crossed his arms. She wore glasses tonight. He had never seen her do so before and wondered if she needed them for reading and close-up work the way many humans did once they reached their forties. The frames were black, reminding him of those that had been popular in the sixties. Her long hair was pulled back in a slightly disheveled bun. The jeans and blazer she'd apparently changed into before going back to work hugged her beautiful figure.
She had, as Sheldon would say, a real sexy-librarian thing going on that heated Seth's blood. The longer he watched her, the more he wanted to touch her, to peel that blazer off, loosen her hair, and -
"Finally," she announced with a sigh. Closing the file, she removed her glasses and spun the chair around to face him. When she looked at him, her eyebrows flew up. "Hi."
"Hello."
She studied him for a moment. "Something on your mind?"
Aside from a deep desire to strip her naked? ~ Dianne Duvall

Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come. ~ Tom Robbins

As well as being a creative genius, Vidal Sassoon was a formative figure of the Sixties. Along with the Pill and the mini-skirt, his influence was truly liberating. ~ Mary Quant

In the Sixties, you needed talent to make it. ~ Cilla Black

She had once said that she believed the women's liberation movement of the sixties and seventies was actually a ploy by men to get women to do more. ~ J. Courtney Sullivan

But as a kid, I preferred the black side, and often wished that Mommy had sent me to black schools like my friends. Instead I was stuck at that white school, P.S. 138, with white classmates who were convinced I could dance like James Brown. They constantly badgered me to do the "James Brown" for them, a squiggling of the feet made famous by the "Godfather of Soul" himself, who back in the sixties was bigger than life. I tried to explain to them that I couldn't dance. I have always been one of the worst dancers that God has ever put upon this earth. ~ James McBride

I designed the miniskirt that caused so much havoc in the Sixties - the miniskirt that was such fun but has travelled well to today. ~ Mary Quant

The crows demur at first, but soon grow bold and eat. He talks to them. He tells them of all the things that bother him - that the politics have changed but the politicians are still the same exact people as back in the sixties, only balder and fatter; he tells them that nobody cares about anything important anymore. He tells them that freedom has nothing to do with money, or the McDonald's restaurants. The crows stop eating and listen. ~ Ekaterina Sedia

In the sexual-liberation movement of the sixties, its ideology and practice, neither force nor the subordinate status of women was an issue. It was assumed that - unrepressed - everyone wanted intercourse all the time (men, of course, had other important things to do; women had no legitimate reason not to want to be fucked); and it was assumed that in women an aversion to intercourse, or not climaxing from intercourse, or not wanting intercourse at a particular time or with a particular man, or wanting fewer partners than were available, or getting tired, or being cross, were all signs of and proof of sexual repression. Fucking per se was freedom per se. ~ Andrea Dworkin

I write about what life was like for typical young women of the sixties - not the type that made headlines, the Hanoi Janes or Angela Davises, but moderates who nonetheless got swept up by history's tides during that turbulent time. All that turmoil lends itself to drama, intrigue, and murder. ~ Kay Kendall

Most of my memories of the Sixties are ones of optimism, high spirits and confidence. ~ Mary Quant

I think of the Sixties as being every man for himself. ~ Penelope Tree

Obviously, the Sixties was a time when everyone wanted to experiment, and then everything became very formulated and corporate, so artists tended to get pushed into a kind of pattern. Now, I think that has continued with the emergence of televised talent shows like 'X Factor.' ~ Steve Winwood

It should have been the epiphany of the sixties. Instead it turned out to be its requiem, ~ David Winner

Rob chuckles, I'm not some sparkly-skinned, jealous, child whose sensibilities are still stuck at the turn of the twentieth century. Eve, I can adapt. If we survived the sixties I promise you we can survive learning to share the most important person in either of our long lives. ~ Angela Louise McGurk

I don't think I did anything that my contemporaries didn't; it was just that I was the only one who talked about it. In the Sixties anyone who had a sense of style seemed to be gay. I wanted to indentify with that. ~ David Bowie

The Sixties were an era of extreme reality. I miss the smell of tear gas. I miss the fear of getting beaten. ~ Hunter S. Thompson

When we're out of the eighties, the nineties are gonna make the sixties look like the fifties! ~ Dennis Hopper

Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful. ~ Khaled Hosseini