1960s Music Quotes & Sayings

When it comes to music, we live in a very different world than everyone did in the 1960s and 1970s. — Vanessa Carlton

Thoughts like mine are not reckoned among the delights of life. It is like the dog trying to catch his tail; he does not catch anything. I do not prove anything, only tire myself; but have the satisfaction that another day has passed, or another night gone by. I — Henryk Sienkiewicz

I am a big fan of music and clothing style of the 1960s. Whether in England or the United States, I like everything from that time. — Robert Pattinson

I first bought a Buffy Sainte-Marie record when I was 12, and her music has always remained with me. In the 1960s, as a political activist, Buffy's lyrics were fearless, and I'm very grateful for all the risks that she took. — Morrissey

I was a kid at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, so a lot of things changed. You had pop music coming up, with David Bowie, you had new television programmes and all these things. I was fascinated. — Dries Van Noten

I'm a guitar player, really - I mean, first and foremost - I grew up with all that great 1960s music, in terms of growing up, becoming a musician, so it's like first-love stuff; I'm always going to go back to it. — Todd Rundgren

You know you are in love when you are willing to share your cash-machine number. — Elayne Boosler

The 1960s were big for folk music, and the Kingston Trio led the way. They were the ones who started it all. The music was fresh and alive. College kids loved it and their parents did, too. — George Grove

It seems like the record industry made so much crazy money in the 1960s that everyone wanted to get in on it. Now it's just become very corporate. So all of these people who despise music end up being in charge. — Win Butler

I trust everything, under God, to habit, upon which, in all ages, the lawgiver, as well as the schoolmaster, has mainly placed his reliance,
habit, which makes everything easy, and casts all difficulties upon the deviation from the wonted course. — Henry Brougham, 1st Baron Brougham And Vaux

I'm not scared of hell. I lived a decent life, and I don't think there is such a place, anyway. I'm scared there's nothing." He struggled for breath. A pearl of blood was swelling in the corner of his right eye. "There was nothing before, we all know that, so doesn't it stand to reason that there's nothing after?" "But there is." Dan wiped Charlie's face with the damp cloth. "We never really end, Charlie. I don't know how that can be, or what it means, I only know that it is. — Stephen King

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. — Joe Boyd

I got interested in the idea of music that could make itself, in a sense, in the mid 1960s really, when I first heard composers like Terry Riley, and when I first started playing with tape recorders. — Brian Eno

I always believed that my work should be unfinished in the sense that I encourage people to add their creativity to it, either conceptually or physically. Back in the 1960s, I was calling for 'Unfinished Music,' number one, and number two, with my artwork - I was taking unfinished work into the gallery. And that's how I was looking at it. — Yoko Ono

I do get credit for having a California sound to my music, but I don't think people really know what that means - they think the Beach Boys. I'm thinking more like Sunset Strip in the 1960s and stuff like that. — Ariel Pink

We begin where we are. — Robert Fripp

On first impressions, John seemed more cynical and brash than the others, Ringo the most endearing, Paul was cute, and George, with velvet brown eyes and dark chestnut hair, was the best-looking man I'd ever seen. At the break for lunch I found myself sitting next to him, whether by accident or design I have never been sure. We were both shy and spoke hardly a word to each other, but being close to him was electrifying. — Pattie Boyd

There were others of course - The Velvet Undergound, the Doors- who took risks in the 1960s, when no one knew where any of it was going. Before them were the Beats and before the Beats the avant-garde artists, the futurists, Fluxus, and before that, the blues, outsider music, a mourning for what's expected but will never happen, so why not dance and play and forget for a few moments that we're all alone anyway? — Kim Gordon

When I listen to music from different eras, I sense different things. The 1940s music, there's so much optimism and romance, maybe because they just solved the biggest problem on Earth at that time - World War II. In the 1960s, there was so much creativity and innovation in sound. — Eric Betzig

We have a choice to live or exist! — Harry Styles

Indeed, love is everything but hate is the other side to that coin and it holds equal power. — Kristen Ashley

We -- the industrialized, technologized world -- have never been richer. And yet to an extraordinary extent we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world: addicted to sensation, besieged everywhere by the cacophonous, mind-numbing din of rock music, saturated with pornography, in thrall to the lowest common denominator wherever questions of taste, manners or intellectual delicacy are concerned. Marwick was right: 'The cultural revolution, in short, had continuous, uninterrupted, and lasting consequences'. — Roger Kimball

The Beats were tremendously significant, but chiefly in the way that they provided a preview in the 1950s of the cultural, intellectual, and moral disasters that would fully flower in the late 1960s. The ideas of the Beats, their sensibility, contained in ovo all the characteristics we think of as defining the cultural revolution of the Sixties and Seventies. The adolescent longing for liberation from conventional manners and intellectual standards; the polymorphous sexuality; the narcissism; the destructive absorption in drugs; the undercurrent of criminality; the irrationalism; the naive political radicalism and reflexive anti-Americanism; the adulation of pop music as a kind of spiritual weapon; the Romantic elevation of art as an alternative to rather than as an illumination of normal reality; the pseudo-spirituality, especially the spurious infatuation with Eastern religions: in all this and more the Beats provided a vivid glimpse of what was to come. — Roger Kimball

If anyone ever told five-year-olds the truth about life, he thought, there'd be a rash of kindergarten suicides. — P.J. Tracy

I think Bloomberg's broad vision of the environment in New York City is something I agree with. I broadly stand with his vision for how to deal with climate change and prepare for future weather events. — Bill De Blasio

She is a good girl," Park said. "You don't even know her."
His dad was standing, pushing Park toward the door. "Go," he said sternly. "Go play basketball or something."
"Good girls don't dress like boys," his mother said. — Rainbow Rowell

With all the god-awful suffering in this war, I suppose somebody ought to be enjoying it. — Henry V. O'Neil

I think I definitely learned how to structure songs, just from listening to a lot of 1960s, 1970s pop music, although I'm sure my mother's watchful eye had a lot to do with it. — Caitlin Rose

Music isn't like news, where it's what happened five minutes ago or even 10 seconds ago that matters. With music, a song from the 1960s could be as relevant to someone today as the latest Ke$ha song. — Daniel Ek

I always wanted to make a cover album consisting of obscure psychedelic music from the 1960s - all re-shaped and customized, Ulver style. — Kristoffer Rygg

On marriage ... You gotta love her even when you don't feel like it. Love is a decision, not a feelin', because believe me, you won't be feelin' the love a whole lot of time. — Robin Kaye

Take just one well-known event: The Beatles' 1964 appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show. This has been depicted with astonishing regularity as a pivotal cultural moment; in fact an entire movie -- I Wanna Hold Your Hand -- was built around it. And that Sullivan episode was indeed a major event in popular culture. But did you know that in 1961, 26 million people watched a CBS live broadcast of the first performance of a new symphony by classical composer Aaron Copland? Moreover, with all the attention that sixties rock groups receive, it may come as a surprise to learn that My Fair Lady was Columbia Records' biggest-selling album before the 1970s, beating out those of sixties icons Bob Dylan, Janis Joplin and The Byrds. — Jonathan Leaf

In the 1960s when the recording studio suddenly really took off as a tool, it was the kids from art school who knew how to use it, not the kids from music school. Music students were all stuck in the notion of music as performance, ephemeral. Whereas for art students, music as painting? They knew how to do that. — Brian Eno