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1960s Quotes

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1960s Quotes

“It was as easy as breathing to go and have tea near the place where Jane Austen had so wittily scribbled and so painfully died. One of the things that causes some critics to marvel at Miss Austen is the laconic way in which, as a daughter of the epoch that saw the Napoleonic Wars, she contrives like a Greek dramatist to keep it off the stage while she concentrates on the human factor. I think this comes close to affectation on the part of some of her admirers. Captain Frederick Wentworth in Persuasion, for example, is partly of interest to the female sex because of the 'prize' loot he has extracted from his encounters with Bonaparte's navy. Still, as one born after Hiroshima I can testify that a small Hampshire township, however large the number of names of the fallen on its village-green war memorial, is more than a world away from any unpleasantness on the European mainland or the high or narrow seas that lie between. (I used to love the detail that Hampshire's 'New Forest' is so called because it was only planted for the hunt in the late eleventh century.) I remember watching with my father and brother through the fence of Stanstead House, the Sussex mansion of the Earl of Bessborough, one evening in the early 1960s, and seeing an immense golden meadow carpeted entirely by grazing rabbits. I'll never keep that quiet, or be that still, again. This was around the time of countrywide protest against the introduction of a horrible laboratory-confected disease, named 'myxomatosis,' into the warrens of old England to keep down the number of nibbling rodents. Richard Adams's lapine masterpiece Watership Down is the remarkable work that it is, not merely because it evokes the world of hedgerows and chalk-downs and streams and spinneys better than anything since The Wind in the Willows, but because it is only really possible to imagine gassing and massacre and organized cruelty on this ancient and green and gently rounded landscape if it is organized and carried out against herbivores.”

LiteratureWomenSilenceQuietEuropeEnglandCrueltyWorld War IiRabbits1960sCountrysideMansionsJane AustenLiterary CriticismHiroshimaHampshireMassacreNapoleonWind In The WillowsNapoleonic WarsMeadow11th CenturyPersuasion NovelSussexWatership DownGassingRichard AdamsTownshipsWar MemorialsEarl Of BessboroughMyxomatosisNew ForestTheatre Of Ancient Greece
Book:Hitch 22: A Memoir
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“Harry, I’m sorry for whatever pain this is causing you, truly sorry, but it’s very important that at this point in our lives we don’t let guilt feelings motivate us. I’m trying to look honestly into myself, too see who I am, and where I should be going. I want us both, Harry, to come to a decision we can live with. It’s the year nineteen sixty-nine and there’s no reason for two mature people to smother each other to death simply out of inertia. I’m searching for a valid identity and I suggest you do the same.”

Relationship1960s
Book:Rabbit Redux
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“...TV was entertainment of the last resort. There was nothing on during the day in the summer other than game shows and soap operas. Besides, a TV-watching child was considered available for chores: take out the trash, clean your room, pick up that mess, fold those towels, mow the lawn... the list was endless. We all became adept at chore-avoidance. Staying out of sight was a reliable strategy. Drawing or painting was another: to my mother, making art trumped making beds. A third choir-avoidance technique was to read. A kid with his or her nose in a book is a kid who is not fighting, yelling, throwing, breaking things, bleeding, whining, or otherwise creating a Mom-size headache. Reading a book was almost like being invisible - a good thing for all concerned.”

Growing UpSummerNostalgia1960sChores1960s Nostalgia
Book:Libraries of Minnesota
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“I am always being asked: ‘What are the Beatles really like?’ I never know quite what to say because they are what they are and anyone who has ever seen or heard them either in person, or on radio or screen has, basically, as much chance as I have of knowing what they are like. I believe and I must say it, that they are quite magnificent human beings, utterly honest, often irritating but splendid citizens shining in a very ordinary, not very pleasing world.”

CharacterMusic1960sPersonalitiesThe BeatlesBrian Epstein
Book:A Cellarful of Noise: The Autobiography of the Man Who Made the Beatles With a New Companion Narrative
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“Cops and Robbers in 1965 England was still a kind of Ealing comedy: crimes rarely involved firearms. The denizens of F-wing were losers in a game they had been playing against the cops. In queues for exercise, the constant questions were 'What you in for, mate?', followed by 'What you reckon you'll get?' When Freddie and I responded with 'Suspicion of drug possession' and 'We're innocent, we'll get off' they would burst into laughter, offering: 'Listen, mate, they wouldn't have you in here if they had any intention of letting you off. You're living in dreamland, you are.”

Music1960s
Book:White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s
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“John… Paul… George. And Ringo. Collectively the four most famous names in the world. Extraordinary young men who have directly altered the lives of hundreds, even thousands of people. Who have affected the entire balance of the entertainment industry, who have kicked up so much dust that in all our lifetimes, it will not completely settle.”

Music1960sCulture QuotesThe BeatlesBrian Epstein
Book:A Cellarful of Noise: The Autobiography of the Man Who Made the Beatles With a New Companion Narrative
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“I remember when we went into Kezar Stadium on the march (April 15, 1967, San Francisco) playing that song—I felt like I was part of some surrealistic dream. We were riding along in this truck. The band was playing. It was like a misty kind of rain. It was early in the morning. The streets were lined with people hanging out of windows and everything. And we were going up the street. I was just stoned out of my head on LSD, everything kind of like vibrating and I was looking around and you could see soldiers and people sneering and you see pictures of napalmed children and signs saying “End the War” and we were playing this joyous incredible music and people were dancing all around the truck just dancing and throwing flowers up in the air and everything and we were singing, “Whoopee, we’re all gonna die!” And it was like we were sort of heading off to these beautiful pastoral gas chambers, we were all going to parade ourselves into these gas chambers and then they were going to wipe us out… I mean, if you gotta go, you might as well go out dancing and singing.”

MusicProtest1960sVietnam WarLsdCounterculture
Author:Country Joe McDonald
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“I understand, Bill. Because I tell myself a lot of stories to help me sleep at night. Stories about how Babe was my dearest friend, and I never betrayed her. Stories about how you and I had a great love, not just an occasional roll in the hay whenever she was out of town. Stories about how wonderful life was back then, when none of us told each other the truth, but so what? It was all so beautiful, wasn’t it? It was all so lovely and gracious. Not like it is now.”

TruthNew YorkNostalgia1960sThe Past
Book:The Swans of Fifth Avenue
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“You have to conclude that your country has run amuck, that the people responsible are insane, that you can not trust your leaders, your President, your general, your parents, your friends, your neighbors, you co-workers, your police, your town, your state, your country, anymore because it is liable to turn upon you for no reason at all, except that for its own security it needs a scapegoat, any scapegoat including you, and there is no appeal possible.”

Society1960sModern TimesMythbustersIt Was Ever Thus
Book:The Secret
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“Ricky Marigold was his name up at the commune. He was seventeen, had run away from home in Pacoima and was a righteous grasshead. He wasn't a bad kid, just fucked up. He was for: love, truth, gentleness, getting high, staying high, good sounds, pleasant weather, funky clothes and rapping with his friends. He was against: Viet Nam, the Laws with their riot sticks, violence, bigotry, random hatred, nine-to-five jobs, squares who tried to get you to conform, grass full of seeds and stems, and bringdowns in general. He met Jack Gardiner on the corner of Laurel Canyon and Sunset, across from Schwab's where the starlets went to show off their asses. He saw Jack Gardiner as a little too old to be making the scene, but the guy looked flaky enough: lumberjack shirt, good beard, bright eyes; and he seemed to be friendly enough. So Ricky invited him to come along. They walked up Laurel Canyon, hunching along next to the curb on the sidewalkless street. "Gonna be a quiet scene," Ricky said. "Just a buncha beautiful people groovin' on themselves, maybe turning on, you know." The older man nodded; his hands were deep in his pants pockets. They walked quite a while, finally turning up Stone Canyon Road. A mile up the twisting road. Jack Gardiner slipped a step behind Ricky Marigold and pulled out the blade. Ricky had started to turn, just as Connie's father drove the shaft into Ricky's back, near the base of the spine. Ricky was instantly paralyzed, though not dead. He slipped to the street, and Jack Gardiner dragged him into the high weeds and junk of an empty lot. He left him there to die. Unable to speak, unable to move, Ricky Marigold found all the love draining out of him. Slowly, for six hours, through the small of his back.”

PainDeathMurderCaliforniaDeceitLos Angeles1960sCountercultureHippiesSixties
Book:The Deadly Streets
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“The Roller Trip by Stewart Stafford A psychedelic Rolls-Royce ride, Lennons and pals giggle inside, Chauffeur whistles as secrets slip, Hourglass liquid lets sentience rip. Supplied narcotics set minds ablaze, Looping the loop in a magenta haze: "Ladies & Germs, to a scene obscene! Set sail to ecstasy we've never seen!" Wheels whirled wild in a swirling blur, Yokels mouth breathe where cows concur, Red light flare, fans storm captive glass, Mary Jane and Lucy on laughing gas. Below the speed limit, warp speed fast, Canary oil slides on a ghost ship's mast, Paisley spermatozoa in jigging fright, Tumbling back to earth as day flipped night. © 2025, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.”

HumorHumourDrugs1960sPsychedelicSurrealismWordplayTripJohn LennonThe Beatles
Author:Stewart Stafford
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“The hippies saw themselves as enlightened. They were in fact about as endarkened as it was possible to get, the absolute enemies of Apollo. We need a new 1960s style revolution, but one which is much better thought out with regard to it consequences. Above all, it has to be explicitly allied to Apollonian forces, and explicitly resistant to anarchism, libertarianism and individualistic narcissism. Cataclysmically, 60s individualism mated with Ayn Rand’s anarcho-capitalist libertarianism, which detests government, authority and the State. We thus have the worst of Dionysian individualism and irrationalism, and no Apollonian collectivism and rationalism.”

SexIndividualismNarcissismRock And RollDrugs1960sHippiesAyn RandDionysianApollonian
Book:The Liberty Wars: The Trump Time Bomb
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“My definition of an intellectual is someone who can listen to the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger" - Billy Connolly”

LifeWarRomanceLiteratureFriendshipMusicAdventureDramaAbuseTragedyLove StoryRecoveryIntimacyImmigrantsVietnamRock N RollAmerican Dream1960sVisionsContemporary FictionCountercultureFolkCivil UnrestPositive Ending
Book:Boulder Blues: A Tale of the Colorado Counterculture
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“King had marched six weeks earlier through the Mississippi town where the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered. He had called it the most savage place he had ever seen. Now he revised his opinion: 'I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”

PoliticsCivil RightsChicagoAmerican Politics1960sCivil Rights MovementMartin Luther King JrMlkChicago Freedom MovementChicago Open Housing Movement
Book:Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America
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“However, like Elasti-Girl and Batgirl, many of the DC’s female characters got better treatment than the heroines featured in Marvel Comics. Scanning a comic book rack in the ’60s, the covers would tell two different stories about the women starring within those pages. Wonder Woman and Supergirl starred in comic books that featured their names on the covers. These heroines were often seen performing great feats of strength like battling monsters or stopping missiles with their bare hands. Batgirl’s name might be featured prominently on a cover of Detective Comics. The Doom Patrol’s Elasti-Girl was shown in the thick of battle fighting side by side with her male compatriots. On the Marvel Comics covers, Invisible Girl, Wasp, and Marvel Girl were shown struggling in the clutches of a villain, or watching helplessly from the background as their male teammates took care of business.”

1960sMarvelDc Comics
Book:Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines
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“When DC Comics was trying to figure out how to retool Wonder Woman’s image to make her cooler, they looked at another Diana—Diana Rigg. Rigg had caused a stir as Mrs. Emma Peel when the British TV series The Avengers was imported to the US in 1966. Mrs. Peel defined the heroine of the mod ’60s—brilliant as she was beautiful, witty, champion fencer, martial arts ex-pert, modern artist, crack shot with a pistol, and fearless secret agent. Attired in sleek black leather catsuits or mod body stockings, Emma Peel was a true force to be reckoned with, combining beauty, brains, and power.”

1960sWonder WomanDc ComicsDiana RiggEmma Peel
Book:Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines
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“Every Friday evening since the late sixties, at 5:00 p.m. we'd walk into the nearby Brompton Cemetery, which, since its four corners connect Fulham, Chelsea, South Kensington, and Earl's Court, was a convenient meeting point for all our friends. We'd plan our weekend on the grave of Admiral Angus Whitewater. We didn't know the Admiral, he just happened to have an impressive horizontal slab of black marble over his last resting place, which made a great table for drinks.”

London1960sCemeteryUrban LifeCemeteries
Author:Pooley Clara
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“We were women in transition, raised in one era and coming of age in another, very different time...here we were, entering the workplace in the 1960s questioning--and often rejecting--many of the values we had been taught. We were the polite, perfectionist "good girls," who never showed our drive or our desires around men. Now we were becoming mad women, discovering and confronting our own ambitions, a quality praised in men but stigmatized--still--in women.”

WomenDiscrimination1960sGood Girls
Book:The Good Girls Revolt: How the Women of Newsweek Sued their Bosses and Changed the Workplace
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“In the waning decades of the twentieth century, liberals and conservatives alike cast the lingering divisions of the 1960s less as matters of law and order than as matters of life and death. Either abortion was murder and guns meant freedom or guns meant murder and abortion was freedom. How this sorted out came to depend upon party affiliation.”

LifeDeathMurderAbortion20th Century1960sGunsLaw And OrderConservativesLiberals
Book:These Truths: A History of the United States
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“Male and female sexuality are very different, we are told, [...] None the less women are instructed to try to develop male sexual responses in order to be the 'ideal lover'. [...] So clearly sexual behaviour is not natural or inevitable. It can be learned where this serves the interests of male-dominant heterosexuality, and is only disconcertingly recalcitrant where such learning might serve women's interests.”

1960sFemale SexualitySexual RevolutionMale Sexuality
Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“On arrival at Orly Airport, Fritz and Magda hired a taxi which drove them to the city. They saw before them a metropolis crowned with triumphal architecture and magnificent monuments. The first Parisian landmark that caught their eye was the majestic Eiffel Tower and, in the background, on a distant hill, the white church of Montmartre. They immediately opted that their hotel could wait and asked the driver to take them around the city, though they knew that this would cost them a whole day's budget. What they began to see was simply spectacular: wide areas edified with splendid monuments, fantastic fountains, enchanting gardens and bronze statues representing the best exponents who flourished in the city, amongst whom artists, philosophers, musicians and great writers. The River Seine fascinated them, with boatloads of tourists all eager to see as much as they could of the city. They also admired a number of bridges, amongst which the flamboyant Pont Alexandre III. The driver, a friendly, balding man of about fifty, with moustaches à la Clemenceau, informed them that quite nearby there was the famous Pont Neuf which, ironically, was the first to be built way back in 1607. They continued their tour...”

FranceParis1960sEiffel TowerLouvreMontmartreMalteseMusée D OrsayPigalleSacré Coeur
Book:Memories of Recurrent Echoes
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“The twins spend their second day in Paris at the Louvre. ''... Really great geniuses, eh Fritz? One could barely call them human beings.'' '' As a matter of fact, I don't think they were... just superior beings from some other planet... perhaps from the same one that gave us Mozart and Plato, for it's impossible that a mere human being create such monumental works.'' ''Wonderful...”

FranceParisPlato1960sArtsArtists LifeLouvreMozartMalteseMusée D Orsay
Book:Memories of Recurrent Echoes
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“In the following days the twins went all over the city; they visited more museums, particularly the avant-garde ones. Whenever Magda spotted a Van Gogh her eyes would fill with tears, remembering the aberrational agony this great artist had gone through. The work that stirred her most was one of those many self-portraits of the artist in a sober and tormented mood; a painting built by many heavy brushstrokes of dense undiluted paint applied spirally giving the impression that the image was materializing from a turquoise background. Magda spent a full ten minutes before one such portrait. When she returned back to earth she noticed a young man beside her, as absorbed with the painting as she was and whose face looked familiar.”

FranceParis1960sArtsArtists LifeLouvreVan GoghVincent Van GoghMalteseMusée D Orsay
Book:Memories of Recurrent Echoes
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“But the increasing independence of women provided a direct threat to the maintenance of male power and privilege. That no such threat did materialise, it will be argued here, owes a great deal to the success of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was a counter-revolution and constituted a timely adjustment to the fine-tuning of the heterosexual institution. [...] . Sex was constructed to be the new binding ingredient in marriage which would compensate for the decreased efficiency of legal and economic constraints. The 1960s was a new time of crisis for male supremacy and a new adjustment had to be made.”

1960sSexologyFeminist CritiqueSex Revolution
Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“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.”

1960sProgressivesHippies
Book:The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture
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“There were elements of Mad Men at Newsweek, except that unlike the natty advertising types, journalists were notorious slobs and our two- and three-martini lunches were out of the office, not in...Kevin Buckley, who was hired in 1963, described the Newsweek of the early 1960s as similar to an old movie, with the wisecracking private eye and his Girl Friday. "The 'hubba-hubba' climate was tolerated," he recalled. "I was told the editors would ask the girls to do handstands on their desk. Was there rancor? Yes. But in this climate, a laugh would follow.”

WomenSexism1960sMad MenNewsweekGirl Friday
Author:Lynn Povich
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“Like many others of the younger generation, for Magda and Fritz the last years of the sixties were the utopian meaning of paradise on earth, the more so for Magda who had graduated with honours. She had based a part of her thesis on the philosophical perspective of the Expressionist movement, particularly what the philosopher Nietzsche wrote in his book Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in which, amongst other things, he stated: ''What does my shadow matter?... Let it run after me!... I shall out-run it...'' And that's what Magda wanted to do with her life: declare herself independent from conventional thought and from past memories.”

PhilosophyLiteratureParis1960sNietzscheFriedrich NietzscheExpressionismZarathustraThus Spoke ZarathustraMaltese
Book:Memories of Recurrent Echoes
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“The weapons attacking her were a diverse mix: antiques such as American carbines, Czech-style machine guns, Japanese Type-38 rifles; newer weapons such as standard-issue People's Liberation Army rifles and submachine guns, stolen from the PLA after the publication of the "August Editorial"; and even a few Chinese dadao swords and spears.”

China1960sGunsCultural RevolutionMilitary WeaponsChinese Cultural RevolutionMiltiary
Book:Iel Migration Law in China
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“It was 1969, and for all the girls and women I knew, life changed profoundly in those four years of college. In 1965 we entered, most of us virginally, as freshmen in knee socks and loafers, looking for husbands and studying art history. We graduated in bell-bottoms and white armbands, taking the Pill and attempting to save the world.”

1960sBirth Control1969Sexual Freedom1965
Book:Making Masterpiece: 25 Years Behind the Scenes at Masterpiece Theatre and Mystery! on PBS
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“Unlike the civil rights struggles of African Americans or the protest politics surrounding the Vietnam War, the Chicano and Puerto Rican movements represent a decidedly underexplored aspect of 1960s New Left radicalism. Outside of the communities themselves, the names, places, and events of these two movements are virtually unknown.”

HistoryCivil Rights1960sVietnam WarPuerto RicoChicanoChicano MovementLatino HistoryPuerto Rican Movement
Book:The Trouble with Unity: Latino Politics and the Creation of Identity
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“It would be hard. After all, I'm working. I'm a mother. Number one, I'm a mother & housewife, so there's the house kind of chores. In the evenings, I might attend some meeting, & then late at night, I would be either writing to the brothers & sisters in prison or working on the leaflets of their cases. Then on the weekend, at least every other weekend, we'd visit the political prisoners...I mean everybody has their whole life & things they have to do at home. But I'll tell you, we were busy during this time. Every week, more brothers & sisters would be arrested. We were working on scores of cases at the same time--trying to keep up with visiting, writing, attending court hearings. If I could show you all the leaflets we made, you'd get an idea of how expansive the work was.”

1960sPolitical PrisonersPolitical OrganizingBlack Liberation MovementYuri Kochiyama
Book:Heartbeat of Struggle: The Revolutionary Life of Yuri Kochiyama
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“We were ready to rock out and we waited and waited and finally it was our turn ... there were a half million people asleep. These people were out. It was sort of like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud. And this is the moment I will never forget as long as I live: A quarter mile away in the darkness, on the other edge of this bowl, there was some guy flicking his Bic, and in the night I hear, "Don't worry about it, John. We're with you." I played the rest of the show for that guy. —John Fogerty recalling Creedence Clearwater Revival's 3:30 a.m. start time at Woodstock.”

LovePeaceMusic1960sRockWoodstockLive Music1969Hippies
Book:Bad Moon Rising: The Unofficial History of Creedence Clearwater Revival
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“I know it's become fashionable to depict the police as sadistic Cossacks riding down innocent citizens, but I've become well enough acquainted with law-enforcement agencies across the country to know that's just not the case. Of course, a certain small percentage of policemen are irresponsible...but that doesn't justify the current unjust barrage of propaganda against a tribe of men who are hard-working, underpaid and daily risking their lives to protect us. I'm sure there are isolated instances of police brutality, but the rising crime rate and urban violence constitute a far, far more pressing problem.”

InspirationPolice1960sPolicemenCapoteTrumancapoteBluelivesmatterEveryoneslivesmatterLawenforcementPolicebrutality
Author:Truman Capote
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“The sexual revolution completed the sexualisation of women. Both married and unmarried women were expected now to become experts in sexually servicing men, and to get over their own tastes and interests in order to become efficient at this task. Where once a large group of single women might have escaped the destiny of servicing men and concentrated upon their own life work, they were now conscripted into compulsory heterosexuality.”

1960sSexual RevolutionSingle WomanMarried WomanHeterossexuality
Book:Anticlimax: a feminist perspective on the sexual revolution
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“Don't be afraid. There is no more to fear. Do not fear rejection. If you fear rejection by another you do not love the other, though you may profess it. You are only being anxious for his love of you. The free man does not seek the love of others, nor fear that his love will be rejected, for rejection - as is known from the night Christ was betrayed - does not destroy love, and it does not destroy the one who loves. Don't be afraid, you are not alone.”

ChristianLawyer1960sEpiscopaliansPage 22
Author:William Stringfellow
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