60s Quotes & Sayings

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

Sometimes, I write '60s or '80s style pop songs. — Peter Steele

Sometimes I listen to '60s or oldies stations to see if they're going to play a Beach Boys song. — Mike Love

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

I like to shoot beautiful things. My two previous movies were one in the '60s, the other one in the '50s, and this one is in the '20s. This is a period that's very cinegenic. The cars, the props, the suits, the haircuts, the dresses, everything, and it gives you pleasure to compose frames with that material. The music, I really love jazz, so for me, when you have good materials and nice things, it's very pleasant. — Michel Hazanavicius

The late '60s and the '70s, a lot of this really beautiful equipment was being made and installed into studios around the world and the Neve boards were considered like the Cadillacs of recording consoles. They're these really big, behemoth-looking recording desks; they kind of look like they're from the Enterprise in Star Trek or something like that. They're like a grayish color, sort of like an old Army tank with lots of knobs, and to any studio geek or gear enthusiast it's like the coolest toy in the world. — Dave Grohl

By the '50s and '60s, war movies had become big and impersonal. They almost never bothered to characterize the Japanese enemy as particularly evil; in fact, they never bothered to characterize him at all. — Stephen Hunter

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

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

Back in the '50s and '60s, most politicians were concerned about not talking about faith, partly because there were consequences you had to deal with - (for instance) Catholicism had been made an issue. — Barack Obama

It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere. — Marian Wright Edelman

The main stuff I like is from the late '60s to the early '90s. That's the stuff I love. It's the James Cameron's and the Paul Verhoven stuff. I guess when I was younger, 'Star Wars' had an influence. — Neill Blomkamp

Roman Candles was shown in a church, and so was Eat Your Makeup, so was Mondo Trasho, and so was Multiple Maniacs (1970). It's hard to imagine that churches showed these movies but a few in the '60s, like St. Mark's Church, or on the Bowery, they always were left-wing. — John Waters

In the U.S., the '50s and '60s marked the documentary's golden age, especially at CBS, where pioneering television journalist Edward R. Murrow, immortalised in George Clooney's 'Good Night, and Good Luck,' produced such landmark investigations as the CBS Reports programme 'Hunger in America.' — Naomi Wolf

If Star Wars had been released in the late '60s, or late '80s, or late '90s, adjusting for technology, it fits spectacularly well. — Cass Sunstein

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

The best thing I ever heard was in the '60s. I heard Jimi Hendrix play 'I Can Hear The Grass Grow' after a rehearsal, and it was brilliant. — Roy Wood

In the past, in the '60s and '70s, genres were much more segmented. You had action guys who were deadly serious about it, and I think you had comics that were comics. — Adam McKay

Back in the 1950s and '60s, J. M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan' - starring Mary Martin and Cyril Ritchard - was regularly aired on network television during the Christmas season. I must have seen it four or five times and remember, in particular, Ritchard's gloriously camp interpretation of Captain Hook. — Michael Dirda

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

So by the time the 60s rolled in that became a huge art form in its own right with bands like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Hendrix doing total concept albums, same thing with Pink Floyd. — DJ Spooky

When I was a kid, a lot of my parents' friends were in the music business. In the late '60s and early '70s - all the way through the '70s, actually - a lot of the bands that were around had kids at a very young age. So they were all working on that concept way early on. And I figured if they can do it, I could do it, too. — Slash

Well, I don't think it ever did, but in the early '60s I got interested in folk music. — Warren Zevon

The lion's share of what I hear right now are people who, intentional or accidental, have avoided all jazz prior to 1960. And all the musicians who were successful in the '60s spent their entire lives, prior to 1960, listening to all the musicians these people avoid. — Branford Marsalis

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

Shoes? I have loved them all: '60s pumps; white Courreges ankle boots; platform soles from the first time around, in the '70s; more boots - ankle, calf, and knee-high; 1980s sneakers; pin heels and wedges; Mary Janes and stilettos. — Suzy Menkes

In the late '60s, I was seven, eight, nine years old, and what was going on in the news at that time that really excited a seven, eight, nine year old boy was the Space Race. — Chris Hadfield

I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous. — Thom Mayne

Funding for the original manned Voyager Mars Program was scratched in 1968, before humans had gotten out of Low Earth Orbit. Mid-'60s plans for a Venus fly-by with astronauts actually flying by it met the same fate. — P. J. O'Rourke

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

The reason why you were allowed to get away with that in the '60s and '70s is because this country's racist administrative policies were such that rich white kids were getting exemptions. I said no exemptions. — Montel Williams

I have nothing but the best memories of growing up in New Jersey. Of course, I grew up in a nice town, a suburb. But Tenafly was right next to Englewood, which had a tremendous amount of racial tension in the '60s. So I was aware of the real world. — Lesley Gore

The English playwrights of the '50s and '60s didn't really keep writing or getting produced, while the Irish did. There's encouragement for the younger ones also in the fact that Ireland is exceptional in its ability to make theater part of the national dialogue, and it reaches to all four corners of the country. — Garry Hynes

In the '50s and '60s, a family's first child went into the priesthood, the second went into the military, and the third child was an idiot and wound up in advertising. — Jerry Della Femina

When punk and new wave styles exploded in the late '70s, some established artists were nimble enough to respond to the changes around them. Some grumbled, "What am I supposed to do, forget how to play?", and continued to ride their dinosaurs into extinction, but others willingly adapted to the streamlining and back-to-basics urges of the times, without giving up all they had learned. Former Genesis singer Peter Gabriel, for example, or former Yes keyboardist Trevor Horn, continued to produce vital, influential music through the '80s and '90s. Ian Anderson has continued to lead Jethro Tull out of the '60s and '70s and quietly through the decades, making high quality music and finding a large enough audience to continue recording and touring worldwide. — Neil Peart

I'm much more conscious of historical events since the '60s. In the '60s, I was insulated by my own addictions, my own lifestyle, from what was going on in the world. After I recovered I was amazed at certain people who had died. I hadn't noticed that they had gone. Not friends ... I'm talking about public figures who had passed away. — Tennessee Williams

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

As Black people, if there is one thing we can learn from the 60s, it is how infinitely complex any move for liberation must be. For we must move against not only those forces which dehumanize us from the outside, but also against those oppressive values which we have been forced to take into ourselves. Through examining the combination of our triumphs and errors, we can examine the dangers of an incomplete vision. Not to condemn that vision but to alter it, construct templates for possible futures, and focus our rage for change upon our enemies rather than upon each other. — Audre Lorde

The new towns of the 1950s and '60s were nothing less than the spatial translation of alienation and control and in these cities power increasingly could relinquish the old forms of advertising in favor of 'the simple organization of the spectacle of objects of consumption, which will only have consumable value illusory to the extent to which they will first of all have been objects of spectacle'
to the extent, that is, they have first appeared on the television screen, which henceforth had to be seen as an urbanistic tool in its own right. — Tom McDonough

Dad was a retired chemist who, in his 60s, fathered and fed me and my two sisters while Mum worked as a secretary. He made us curries, Chinese meals and strange concoctions. He was often unsuccessful. — Tamsin Greig

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

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

I think the public needs to be reminded just how much inspiration and intention was given throughout the world to be bold, to send human beings to the moon in the '60s and the '70s. It's important now to bring together the nations that weren't able to do it then and help them do it. We need to move forward. — Buzz Aldrin

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it. — James Lovelock

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

Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other. — Claes Oldenburg

Well, my piano's really beautiful. I actually have two pianos. I have a Yamaha upright from the '60s that's blond, wood, and black, and I also have one from the '20s from Chicago - not a well-known brand or anything. — Zooey Deschanel

I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement. — P. J. O'Rourke

There are not a lot of places for an actor to explore what it's like to be a woman in her 60s. There aren't any films about it and there very few TV series about it. — Sally Field

I've always been anti-marriage for men until they become mature. As a species we don't mature until we're in our 60s. — Gene Simmons

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

The '60s are presented to kids today as a commodity. — Bernadine Dohrn

I listen to oldies but goodies stations, '60s and '70s music. — Brian Wilson

Students in the '60s were responsible for great changes, politically and socially. — Tom Ford

My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the '60s, at a time of incredible activism. — Cory Booker

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

I work in the '60s more than I've done anything else. I did a movie, called 'Down with Love', in the '60s. I did a movie for HBO about the Johnson administration in the '60s. — Sarah Paulson

And then we watched an amazing number of movies from the late '60s and '70s, which is my favorite time, and we studied their camera movements, their stocks, the way they lit stuff, the colors they used. — Ted Demme

I've always been drawn to the American style in the late '50s and '60s. — Thom Browne

I'd pick a young white guy over an old white guy for president anytime because the younger guy is more likely to have been influenced by the great social changes of the '60s and '70s. — D. L. Hughley

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

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war. — Tom Brokaw

Spaces I love to do - the uglier the better - tend to be really old, dated basements - especially from the '60s to the '80s. I love those. — Candice Olson

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

My parents had five children in six years and one week, meaning that my mom was pregnant for most of the '60s and driving carpools for most of the '70s. When we were young, she dressed us alike so she could pick us out in crowds: identical skirts for the four girls with the color-coordinated pants for my brother. — Christine Pelosi

If you go back to the '50s and '60s ... there was zero tech in S.F. It was all in the Valley ... and it crept northward in early 2000s. — Mitch Kapor

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

Depending on which side of the fence you're on, you could argue that the sexual liberation of the late '60s, led to women being emancipated in some ways. That they found a voice during that time, with feminism. It's complicated. — Steve Coogan

I did standup while still working for Johnny Carson in the mid-'60s, thus gaining the advantage of at least getting laughs from him about how I hadn't the night before. — Dick Cavett

It's very common to say that Star Wars in the late '70s, that was kind of perfect for Cold War culture and the aftermath of Vietnam in the '60s to have an upbeat, hopeful, cartoonish tale of a hero's journey. I think those explanations are easy to offer and almost always wrong. — Cass Sunstein

The 60s undoubtedly were the most turbulent years of the century. — Walter Cronkite

Surrealism was necessary - essential, even - in the 1920s to bridge the gap between rationalism and the subconscious. It started something important. But by the early '60s, it had become petit-bourgeois; it was too intellectual and romantic, and had ground to a halt. It had become respectable. — Alejandro Jodorowsky

It has been difficult to hold onto many paintings but I have retained a few. Possibly the current favorite is titled 'Big Band' completed in 2005. It measures 13 feet x 9 feet. It has 18 nearly life size recognizable portraits of the biggest jazz stars that I knew and saw perform in the 1950s, '60s, '70s, '80s and includes Wynton Marsalis. — LeRoy Neiman

Music was transmitted over the airwaves in the '60s - for free, even - astonishingly enough without Bit Torrent. — Andrew Rosenthal

I love French auto design of the early '50s, '60s, early '70s of Citorens, Renaults, and Peugeots. They're so unique. — John Lasseter

I'm a purist, and I love the sport. I loved the '60s and '70s, when the fans even enjoyed the races where only four cars finished, and they were two laps apart. — Jacques Villeneuve

True, many radicals of the '60s were quite enthusiastic supporters of imposed choices, but only when these affected distant peoples of whom they knew little. — Tony Judt

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

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

If you went to school in Nashville, you were aware of all those '60s rockabilly people. — Kim Dickens

Liverpool really ever since I can remember, but anyway in the '50s and '60s was always a place where people were potentially in show business, knew someone who was, would like to be, had been but were now doing something else and there was a general recreational feeling in the air at all times. — Derek Taylor

I grew up in the church, with traditional hymns, but at the same time I was beginning to listen to pop music, the mid-60s, The Beatles, which had just as much influence on me as those hymns did. Then the hippy stuff like Pink Floyd started to raise questions about how I lived my life and the world in which I lived. — Alan Green

At the end of the '60s, I was trying to enter the world of comics. — Sergio Aragones

In their matching candy-stripe shirts, the Beach Boys were America's biggest band of the early '60s, transmitting utopian bulletins of summer without end to a cold and overcast nation. — Steve Erickson

I think everybody did their share of experimenting in the 1960s with drugs. My story is real simple. I was taking amphetamines in the late 60s and I was addicted to them. I don't necessarily know the why. I'm sure at the time I could've told you six different reasons why I was doing it. But, in the end, all of that stuff, all chemicals will hurt you. — Tommy James

I don't know why people keep banging on about the '60s. I came from a conventional family and I didn't go off with different people - I rather wish I had now, seeing all the fun everyone else was having. — Jane Birkin

There's a lot of surplus rage from the '60s that was never really worked through publicly. I think a lot of that rage still exists, and I think you see that when John McCain runs a commercial that beats up on Hillary Clinton's earmark for a Woodstock museum. — Rick Perlstein

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

She'd believed in the promises of the '60s, after all, even if she'd participated only indirectly. Hadn't they told themselves they would not be like the generation of their parents, trapped in choices they'd made at twenty? — Garth Risk Hallberg

I love music, and a lot of it. Jazz is probably on the top with guys like Miles Davis. But I even enjoy music from the '60s and '70s. — Donovan Bailey

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

By the time [of modern] generation was coming of age sexually, there was already this idea of safe sex. But that didn't exist for me. I came out of the free-swinging '60s and '70s. It was free love, baby. That was it. We had very liberal sex-ed classes in 1973, a yearlong environmental science class, and then Women's Lib and Gay Liberation. So it's insane to go from that to Reagan and AIDS. It was like, "What happened? Where's my future?" — Michael Stipe

You look at most artists, the arc of their career, there's a definite decline at the end. And that decline could set in at any time. In your 50s, or your 60s and 70s if you're lucky. Time goes by fast, and you've got to be busy all the time. — Seth

The coming cooling of the planet overall will return it to where it was in the '60s, '70s, and '80s. — Joe Bastardi

The '60s may be idealized in the movie from a cultural point of view, but the decade was all about discord and a big generational split that was very painful. — Jane Fonda

I was always interested in animals, but when I was little, animal behavior was still a new science. It was available to become a veterinarian, it was available to study biology, but not specifically animal behavior. In the '60s, Jane Goodall was the founder of this new science. — Isabella Rossellini

Have you ever taken a hard look at those pictures from the sit-ins in the '60s, a hard, serious look? Have you ever looked at the faces? The faces are neither angry, nor sad, nor joyous. They betray almost no emotion. They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I went to big, broken, under-resourced public schools, but we had a real sense of community, because those were days in the '50s and the '60s when every child was under the jurisdiction of every single adult on the block. — Deval Patrick

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people. — Meghan Daum

I truly believe that we're about to enter a second golden age of design. The first one was in the '50s and '60s, when designers like Raymond Loewy, Charles Eames, George Nelson and Dieter Rams were shepherds of the brands they were working with. They had influence over the products and how companies communicated and promoted themselves. — Yves Behar