The'60s Quotes

#1. The '60s weren't my cup of tea. I never bought that philosophy that, you know, we're all brothers and that'll solve everything. And I never believed that music dictated the times. I always thought it reflected them.

Phil Everly

#2. I was in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in the '60s.

Joe Biden

#3. The '60s redefined narcissism as idealism.

Dennis Prager

#4. I fell into hip-hop right from the beginning. I was a teenager in the '60s, so I was putting all my pocket money into buying LPs. I followed the ascent of the Rolling Stones, the Beatles, and Stevie Wonder. I followed popular music very closely, and I've never stopped.

Simon De Pury

#5. The '60s was the end of the America that the rest of the world liked.

Julie Newmar

#6. A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything.

David Talbot

#7. A lot of people that embark on spiritual endeavors tended to, especially in the '60s and '70s, they tended to give up what they had before and cut themselves off from their lives, previous life as it were. But, I don't think that one should do that.

Dave Davies

#8. 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

#9. Back in the '60s and '70s, data were scarce, and while analysts knew that companies with fat gross margins lagged those with thin gross margins early in bull markets - and overachieved in the later phases - they couldn't do much about it.

Kenneth Fisher

#10. It was part of being a girl in the '60s that you were creative.

Lorrie Moore

#11. The moment artists can just do what they love to do then music will go right back to where it used to be. I mean back in the '60s and '70s and '80s, that's what it was.

Akon

#12. I was anorexic in the '60s and '70s, although it wasn't called anorexia then. I thought people would be nicer to me if I looked very small and delicate, so food wasn't high on my agenda. But it is now.

Marianne Faithfull

#13. I'm thankful for the work that feminists like Gloria Steinem have done. I am a feminist, but the geography for women today is vastly different than it was in the '60s.

Amber Heard

#14. 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

#15. I wandered along to the chemistry labs, more or less on the rebound, and asked about becoming a research student. It was the '60s, a time of university expansion: the doors were open, and a 2:1 was good enough to get me in.

John Sulston

#16. 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

#17. Something I miss terribly from the '60s - the most important phrase in the English language was, 'I got hung up.' Somebody says they got hung up, it's unassailable, you know? You don't go near that. Whoa! I know what that can be like.

Alan Arkin

#18. I wanted to be part of a high-class scene of musicians. It was half-inspired because I didn't have many friends, and I was hoping that I would meet people and fall in love and start a community around me, the way they used to do in the '60s.

Lana Del Rey

#19. The '60s aren't over; they won't be over until the Fat Lady gets high.

Ken Kesey

#20. 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

#21. I think kids are fairly similar. It's just really the technology. Like, you won't find kids in the 60s, or anyone for that matter, having mobile phones, texting, watching YouTube, and being absorbed in their technology.

Jared Gilman

#22. The models for me were more the folk-rock singers of the '60s and '70s.

Carly Simon

#23. The United States and Turkey are the only two countries that don't have some kind of subsidy for the Arts. The whole culture in society has made certain films more acceptable. I turned down so many films in the '60s and '70s.

Alex North

#24. In the '60s, parents were told to let their teens rebel, explore their boundaries. Increasingly the same message is being given to the parents of tweens.

Maggie Gallagher

#25. When we bemoan the lost golden age of music, it's worth remembering that mainstream radio listeners of the '60s and '70s, particularly in Canada, missed out on an outpouring of brilliant R&B music.

Dan Hill

#26. In the '60s when I was a student, there was this campaign to destroy 75 percent of the old buildings in Paris, replacing them with modern architecture. I realized this as a dangerous utopia. This modern vision did not understand the richness of the city. Thankfully, such destruction did not happen.

Christian De Portzamparc

#27. Whatever had been on the radio in the '60s; I mean we were always listening to the radio.

Tom Araya

#28. 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

#29. The '60s were an amazing time.

Peter Max

#30. The group of writers I had grown up with in the '60s - Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon - formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.

Seamus Heaney

#31. I guess I would say first of all that we tend to go back to the 60s and we tend to see these struggles and these goals in a relatively static way.

Angela Davis

#32. 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

#33. In the '60s, people were still very protective of each field that they belonged to. Avant-garde artists didn't know about rock or pop or jazz. And the jazz people of course didn't want to know about any other music. They were all just kind of protecting their territory.

Yoko Ono

#34. I got into journalism because I came of age in the '60s. It just seemed one way for me to get things done.

Joe Klein

#35. The 60s will be remembered for The Beatles, Andy Warhol and Me!

Jacqueline Susann

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

Al Sharpton

#37. The '60s was a magical time in the music business. So much creativity and talent. I think a lot of it came from the fact that we had grown up before rock n' roll. We listened to all the great songwriters and big bands, songs with great lyrics and melodies. I think that really influenced everybody.

Frankie Valli

#38. 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

#39. When I came to America in the '60s, it was the place to be. I wonder if I'd come here today.

Helmut Jahn

#40. People say, oh it's a shame, you're not nostalgic about the '60s. Well actually, it's quite good, when you think of it. Wouldn't it be sad if I was sitting here wishing it back?

Robert Wyatt

#41. 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

#42. 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

#43. My mom was an aesthetician and she went to beauty school back in the '60s. I just remember watching her do her makeup all the time. She always had her nails done, makeup on - her face was ready to go when she went out. I loved it.

Emmanuelle Chriqui

#44. My mum used to think it was the pill that made you gay. There was too much estrogen in the water, and people started taking the pill in the '60s, and it made everybody gay.

Russell Tovey

#45. Nobody who lived through the '50s thought the '60s could've existed. So there's always hope.

Tuli Kupferberg

#46. I thought everything was interesting. I wanted to go scuba diving and I wanted to learn how to surf. Because I grew up in the 60s girls were not allowed to do anything. As I've gotten older and realized that women can do things like that I thought, 'Why not? Now's the time.'

Aimee Mann

#47. When I was a kid growing up in the '60s, music was an outlet for enlightenment, frustration, rebellion. It was more about individualism. Today it's just like a big business.

Joey Ramone

#48. 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

#49. When I went to school, it was right after the '60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in ... The idealistic wind of the '60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever.

Steve Jobs

#50. I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam war and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out.

Richard Hell

#51. 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

#52. If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that's a problem. Peace and love are eternal.

John Lennon

#53. In the 60s, if you wanted to be an actor, you couldn't do just one thing.

Barry Bostwick

#54. I was writing with different people in Nashville - whoever I could. Eddie Hinton came on the scene about 1963, and about four years later we wrote a ton of songs together. I drifted around, but Eddie and I had some cuts through the '60s and '70s. I went on the road with Kris Kristofferson in 1970.

Donnie Fritts

#55. Many of our racetracks were built in the '60s - not much real estate for runoff.

Connie Kalitta

#56. In the '60s, my father, Wally Amos, had been a talent agent and a personal manager before taking a major career detour in 1975, when he opened a store selling chocolate chip cookies.

Shawn Amos

#57. I'm from the '60s, but no one has ever accused me of being a hippie. I never had much interest in the Woodstock crowd, which partied to change the world, while real people were starving to death in Africa.

Lloyd Kaufman

#58. Back in the 60s, San Francisco artists lived in communes.

Gedde Watanabe

#59. When I was growing up in the '60s I would have thought that westerns would last forever.

Joe Dante

#60. You may think things didn't change much after the 60s 'revolution' - but they did. The levels of prescriptive disapproval for anyone who stepped outside the norm receded.

Vashti Bunyan

#61. Here at Wisconsin we didn't get an undergraduate course in mathematical logic until the '60s.

Stephen Cole Kleene

#62. I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop.

Thom Gunn

#63. 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

#64. The '60s are my favorite decade - with the Cold War, the women's movement. And then there's the music, the fashion, the clothes, the hair.

Margot Robbie

#65. Wolverine was created in the '60s, but he feels like a '70s character in every way. More Dirty Harry, more politically incorrect, the hair, the mutton chops.

Hugh Jackman

#66. I am one of the graduates of the William Morris famous, famous mail room from the '60s.

Irwin Winkler

#67. Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Czechoslovakia in the '60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the '70s, China in the '80s and '90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists.

Naomi Wolf

#68. I wasn't an active feminist in the '60s, never have been.

Doris Lessing

#69. 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

#70. North American leftists just keep trying to relive the '60s, or to make the '60s happen again.

Dave Sim

#71. I seem to be stuck in the '60s, and my favorite music, cars, and women's fashion come from that era. And the sense of social rebellion. It was a good time for a lot of things.

Amber Heard

#72. The 60s undoubtedly were the most turbulent years of the century.

Walter Cronkite

#73. It's not until I hear songs that I've done, that I realize how much of an inspiration music from the '60s and '70s has been.

Alicia Keys

#74. For me, and maybe for many religious kids of the '60s, the church lost relevance the more it became a surrogate in the movement for social and political change.

Mike McCurry

#75. It's an often-asked question, 'Why did all these spotty white English boys suddenly start playing blues in the '60s?' It was recognized as this kind of vibrant music and when I first started playing in a blues band I just wanted to bring it to a wider public who hadn't really heard it.

Steve Winwood

#76. I don't buy into the glory days thing. I think every time has its great things to it. The '60s were such a glorious time but it's easy to forget that there was all sorts of bullshit too.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt

#77. It was as if, Pulaski sometimes thought, the '60s had tipped the entire country on end and shaken it like a box of cereal until all the flakes ended up in the East Village.

Garth Risk Hallberg

#78. There are some strong female performers out there. But the industry's pre-occupation with the packaging of how a woman looks has gone completely the other way, back to almost the 60s, early 70s.

Siouxsie Sioux

#79. New York in the '60s was amazing.

Nicholas Haslam

#80. In the '60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women's rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn't just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.

George Clooney

#81. 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

#82. My political career goes back to the '60s and those were times of vigorous debates.

Dennis Kucinich

#83. 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

#84. 'Gifts' was just a short little one-verse song that I used to close shows in the '60s.

Bruce Cockburn

#85. I like to mix pieces in my art direction from the '60s or the '40s and the '90s and present-day stuff. To me, that feels very real. When I go into people's houses, it's not all today.

Aaron Ruell

#86. I just love the way the '60s rock stars put themselves together, because they were like dandies and peacocks. They really lived out their fantasies - and dressed their fantasies.

Anna Sui

#87. In the early '70s, coming out of the '60s, it was very hippy or it was very uniform, like The Beatles all wearing the same suit. Into the '70s, it became much more about a personal style. You had the glam period, which was a lot of fun, and then you went into punk.

John Varvatos

#88. The Beatles, the Small Faces and the Kinks were great bands, but that was in the '60s.

Gavin Rossdale

#89. I've had death threats, but I've never been fearful for my life. Although I have traveled with security since the '60s.

Hugh Hefner

#90. You can't be glued in the '60s. Walking around, going up the pub or popping to Tesco in a hunting jacket.

Dave Davies

#91. I was in college for two years, and just hated it in the '60s.

Kurt Loder

#92. There's some new evidence that has just come out about the CIA planning terrorist attacks on U.S. soil in the '60s and how they were going to set up Castro for it in order to get America behind a war in Cuba.

Aaron McGruder

#93. C'mon, I mean who didn't listen to 'The Who' in the 60s?

Patti Smith

#94. 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

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

Courteney Cox

#96. Music has always been in my family, but it was mainly keyboards. I learned to play classical piano, but when I first heard the amazing bass guitar of James Jamerson, who played on all the big Motown hits of the '60s and '70s, I knew bass guitar was my instrument.

Suzi Quatro

#97. I ... had my mind blown by all the opportunities that were in California in the '60s and '70s. In Detroit, everything was Freud ... Out here, everything was Jung.

Leonard Shlain

#98. See, I've always seen Jacques Cousteau as a hero, mate. He's a legend - like my dad, just a legend. And so what he did for conservation in the '60s through the '70s was just phenomenal.

Steve Irwin

#99. There is a scene in one comic from the '60s-'70s where Batman finds a film, a newsreel film, of his father. This newsreel film is from the '50s, and his father has come to this costume ball in a Zorro costume, which strangely enough looks a lot like a Batman suit in the footage.

Tracy Hickman

#100. My parents joined in the 60s and at that time it was really important - there was a group mentality. I could be pulling this out of my ass, but I feel our generation approaches things on a more individual basis, like we're more personal and don't need to be a part of a group.

Taraka Larson