Quotes & Sayings About Hippies

I got out of that immediately was that now, all of a sudden, rock music had become a spectator sport, that corporate labels and their bands were the new establishment, and punk was there to fight them the way the activist hippies must have fought what the establishment must have been ten years before. And it was interesting to see the reactions in different parts of the country. — Jello Biafra

It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing. — Mary McCarthy

It was the uniform of a time and place, of a nearly extinct species - the belligerent middle-American redneck who had fought in Korea, come back with his faith unshaken, and then watched the 1960s unfold the way he might watch his house burn down. There had never been any Summer of Love for Arthur Schuler. He had no interest in Civil Rights, hippies or liberals - or Democrats for that matter. I heard him say once that it might have worked out very well if we had indeed brought all the planes back from Vietnam, just in time to napalm the Woodstock festival. But the man had lived. He had been an orphan of the Great Depression and seen the country and the world. He had made his way, been a barroom fighter and - he hinted - a womanizer at some distant point in the twentieth century, and had come away with an instinct for life, for the things that people do and their base and predictable motivations. We — Matthew Louis

There's a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of "mind expansion" or "warm healing energy." I don't like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet. — Koren Zailckas

Now you may like the images of long-haired hippies running in the streets throwing tear gas canisters, but we didn't end the war. And that's what we set out to do. What was not ended by the anti-war movement was ended by the Vietnamese. That's our shame. — Bill Ayers

I set a discipline for myself to return every afternoon and take photographs like Edward Weston: f22, full sun, big set squares, big circles. I would smoke a joint with some hippies on the grass, then go do some more pictures. — Max Pam

I wanna say hello to all the ex-hippies tonight. I've never been a hippie myself but I'm an honorary hippie. — Bob Dylan

Right from the outset, the prevailing mindset in British comics fandom was a radical and progressive one. We were all proto-hippies, and we all thought that comics would be greatly improved if everything was a bit psychedelic like Jim Steranko. — Alan Moore

My family, my parents are hippies. — Shia Labeouf

In Berkeley and San Francisco, the revolution didn't seem to far away. A lot of white radicals, hippies, Chicanos, Blacks, and Asians were ready to get down. But i hadn't forgotten the hard hats and the red necks and the bible belt and the so called middle amerikans who had elected Nixon. I couldn't imagine how the "new left" was talking to those people, much less organizing and changing their minds. I decided the only way i would come up with answers was to on keep studying and struggling. I didn't know how half of what i was studying would fit in but i figured it would all come in handy some day. I read about guerrilla warfare and clandestine struggle without having the faintest idea that one day i would go underground. It's kind of funny when i think about it because reading that stuff had probably saved my life a million times. — Assata Shakur

All things old become new again. In my youth the athletes had crew cuts and the hippies had long hair. Now the athletes have long hair and the hippies are bald. — Harley King

My Family and Other Saints echoes Gerald Durrell's classic memoir, My Family and Other Animals, not only in its title, but in its wonderful humor and lyrical prose. Like Durrell, Kirin Narayan takes the reader to a fascinating world far from our own, and brings to life its myriad sights, sounds and smells, while revealing the profound cultural beliefs of its people. India is just the most complex character among a cast of characters-family members, gurus, hippies, and neighbors-all of whom I now count as old friends. — Judith Barrington

Always was Morocco. And recently the country's leadership seems to have embraced it in all its ill-reputed glory. The days of predatory poets in search of literary inspiration and young flesh are probably over for good. Hippies can just as easily get their bong riffs in Portland or Peoria. But the good stuff, the real good stuff, the sounds and smells and the look of Tangier
what you see and hear when you lean out the window and take it all in
that's here to stay. — Anthony Bourdain

Hippies survived Nixon, but punk caved in to Ronald Reagan, know what I'm saying? Punk actually couldn't take a good challenge. — Legs McNeil

So dogma, doctrine, unexamined assumptions, that's what it is to be sharing that, the hippies shadow, no way of grounding it to reality. It's where we're just cut off from reality unless we can argue, we can substantiate, we can justify, we can convince each other. — Rebecca Goldstein

People ask if my parents are hippies, but they're actually very conservative. A girl called Rebel sang at their wedding, and that's where my name came from. — Rebel Wilson

The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government. — Vivienne Westwood

Not hippie - my parents were not hippies - but they were very supportive and encouraging, and that does a lot for someone, and it gives them a lot of confidence. — Jenna Elfman

I passed a group of theater students or hippies (sometimes it's hard to tell) sitting in a circle under an oak tree. — Ellie Alexander

On the one hand, there are people known as straight, regular, square (and there are also cubes and tesseracts), classified, degreed, graduated, and moneyed, who live in little boxes made of ticky-tacky, cultivate lawn order, and want to get things ironed out in nothing flat. On the other, there are bohemians, nuts, bums, freaks, eccentrics, beatifics, whollymen, courtesans, vagrants, and hippies (a name which ought to have something to do with the dangerous curves of women's hips), who want to experience the universe in a groovy, swinging, ecstatic, syncopated, rock-and-rolling, mind-blown, turned-on, and far-out way. — Alan W. Watts

The children of America are not rebelling for no reason. They are not hippies for no reason at all. We don't have what we have on Sunset Blvd. for no reason. They are rebelling against something. There are so many things burning the people of this country, particularly mothers. They feel they are going to raise sons - and I know what it's like, and you have children of your own, Mrs. Johnson - we raise children and send them to war. — Eartha Kitt

My parents aren't hippies. I'm North as in the North Pole. Unfortunately. My brother is Nicholas, and my sister is Noelle.
Wow. God. That's
About a hundred times worse than your name.
I was going to say devoted. Festively devoted. — Stephanie Perkins

It's funny how the hippies and the punks tried to get rid of the conservatives, but they always seem to get the upper hand in the end. — Bjork

The absolute defining moment of my life was the day the drug deal went bad. It started out just like any other day, at least for the girlfriend of a dealer. However, this time, it went bad. Really bad. — Valerie Fries Wade

Tragically misinformed, some Christian believers at first looked upon hippies as promising prospects through whom the Church could present the claims of Jesus Christ. Clergymen mistakenly proclaimed that hippies were searching for truth and meaning and needed only to be guided. Wasn't their talk about love? Weren't they seeking an opportunity to share the love of God with others?

On the contrary, the hippies claimed to have found meaning for existence through conscious expanding drugs. And although they sang of love in chants and groans, they knew nothing of love's commitment and concern and duty towards one's neighbor. They ignored the responsibility of love and dwelt upon their quest for uninhibited physical gratification. — Bob Larson

Before 'Veronica Mars,' I was not, and probably am still not, much of a crime reader. My mom left out a copy of 'Helter Skelter' when I was 10, and I secretly read it, and then I spent all my teenage years afraid of hippies. I kept away from crime books for, like, ten years. — Rob Thomas

If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge. — Damon Albarn

In reality punk people are usually the gentlest, kindest folks you'll ever know. They're like hippies, only they wear way more black. — Kate Rockland

The historic transition from Novice to Proficient to Adept was said to be accomplished virtually overnight by the progression from marijuana to peyote to lysergic acid. Instant mysticism had arrived. Before the court of law, hippies demanded freedom for LSD the way early Christians demanded freedom for the Eucharist. — William Everson

Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies. — Robert Anton Wilson

Hippies? Why, I'm the original. — Jerry Lee Lewis

The hippies saw it and lived it for a few shining moments, but the old stories were too strong. Instead of the hippies pulling us all into a new world, we dragged them back into ours. The — Charles Eisenstein

It takes only one bad amp to turn your ears to oatmeal: That's how old hippies became Yanni fans. — Rob Sheffield

There was a little optometrist shop on south Broadway tucked in between a pizza joint and what amounted to a head shop where you could buy glow-in-the-dark posters, bongs, and whatever else the hippies began marketing after they went commercial in the '70s ... I had never visited the optometrist shop. The entrance had a 1930s look that I liked - art deco molded-tin awning over the doorway, and Bakelite tiles on the foyer walls. It looked like the kind of business that would be owned by an elderly optometrist who had serviced families for generations and personally ground lenses in his back room. I liked the look of the shop, but I drove right past it on my way to Sight City!!! where you could buy Two Pair for the Price of One!!! according to the billboards plastered all over Denver blocking every decent view of the Rocky Mountains. — Gary Reilly

Looking back, there is nothing wrong with that peace, love and equality that the hippies espoused. In many ways, we have regressed because they were into organic food, back to nature, make love not war, be good to all men, share and share alike - which is what many are talking about now. — Imelda Staunton

The hippy movement was a failure. All hippies around now just represent complete apathy. There's a million good reasons why the thing failed, OK. But the only thing we've got to live with is that it failed. — Joe Strummer

Nineteen eighty is almost here, thank God. the hippies are getting old, they blew their brains on acid and now they're begging on street corners all over San Francisco. Their hair is tangled and their bare feet are thick and gray as shoes. We're sick of them. — Jennifer Egan

I hate the word 'hippy'. I hate a lot of people, and hippies don't do that! — Shannon Hoon

Then there was the gray of human habitation. The blue places were turning brown, the yellow places to dust, the green places to smoke and ashes. Each time one of the animals disappeared
they went by species or sometimes by organizations of species, interconnected
it was as though all mountains were gone, or all lakes. A certain form of the world. But in the gray that metastasized over continents and hemispheres few appeared to be deterred by this extinguishing or even to speak of it, no one outside fringe elements and elite groups, professors and hippies, small populations of little general importance. The quiet mass disappearance, the inversion of the Ark, was passing unnoticed. — Lydia Millet

Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren't going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time. — Janis Joplin

Elvis was the only man from Northeast Mississippi who could shake his hips and still be loved by rednecks, cops, and hippies. — Jimmy Buffett

The two basic social identities were Normal and Greaser; although a few sophisticated girls wore peace signs, hippies didn't exist, and while a seminal punk band, Iggy and the Stooges, was playing in nearby Ann Arbor, punk didn't exist yet, either. — Mary Gaitskill

Their common denominator of humanism could not be reconciled with the Biblical view of man's depravity after the Fall and his need of salvation. Too late, many ministers began to see that hippie non-conformity with, and rejection of, the world was hardly the same as that high spiritual quest advocated by the Apostle Paul. — Bob Larson

When I left Nashville I went to Texas because that's where I came from, and because I was playing in Texas a lot in different places. And I saw hippies and rednecks drinking beer together and smoking dope together and having a good time together and I knew it was possible to get all groups of people together - long hair, short hair, no hair - and music would bring them together. — Willie Nelson

...I began pulling out old pictures and yearbooks from our Los Angeles high schools and UC Berkeley. Suddenly there we were, thousands of trim-haired, neatly-dressed, conservative-looking youngsters, with perky, forced smiles, encased in identical inch by inch-and-a-quarter boxes for our children to snicker at. Only they did not snicker.
"Mom, this isn't the 60s, is it? — Elise Frances Miller

I was born in a little town called Lund in British Columbia. It's like a fishing village. My parents were hippies. They tried to live off the land, so I grew up in a log cabin, and we didn't get running water until I was 4. The next year, we got electricity. Then we moved to the city, Victoria, British Columbia, so I could go to school. — Stewart Butterfield

Half the people who studied botany were hippies who thought they could return to some natural world system. Somehow feeding seven billion people through pure gathering. — Andy Weir

When the hippie era ended and the hangover began, as idealism gives way to disillusionment, the hair of the marchers and street-dancers kept getting longer, and soon it began to tangle. Free love deteriorated into loveless promiscuity, our great electric Kool-Aid acid test churned out an entire generation of burnt-out old relics, and the hair, once a symbol of freedom, became symbolic of the new face of prison, a lawlessness which taken to its logical extreme would imprison all of society as our growing criminal element took to the streets. — Tommy Walker

I was always embarrassed because my dad wore a suit and my mother wore flat pumps and a cozy jumper while my friends' parents were punks or hippies. — Shirley Manson

To return to the moment of radical innocence. To paint. To stretch canvas. To find the point of originality. It wasn't a hippie idea. Both of us always hated the hippies, their flowers, their poems, their one idea. We were the furthest thing from hippies. We were the edge, the definers. — Colum McCann

Samantha: Listen, you need to get your head around the demographics of this place. So first of all you've got your blue collars - tradies, we call them. We've got a lot of tradies in Pirriwee. Like my Stu. Salt of the earth. Or salt of the sea, because they all surf, of course. Most of the tradies grew up here and never left. Then you've got your alternative types. Your dippy hippies. And in the last ten years or so, all these wealthy execs and banker wankers have moved in and built massive McMansions up on the cliffs. But! There's only one primary school for all our kids! So at school events you've got a plumber, a banker and a crystal healer standing around trying to make conversation. It's hilarious. No wonder we had a riot. — Liane Moriarty

Drinking in a honky tonk, just kicking hippies asses and raising hell. — Jerry Jeff Walker

I simply don't like the culture of drugs. I never liked the hippies for it. I think it was a mistake to be all the time stoned and on weed. It didn't look right and it doesn't look right today either and the damage drugs have done to civilizations are too enormous. And besides, I don't need any drug to step out of myself. I don't want them and I do not need them. — Werner Herzog

I would've given up without her - not on you, never on you, but on myself. I suppose I can tell you this now, but I wasn't a very good student. I wasn't smart enough to just get by. I wasn't focused enough in class. I rarely passed exams. I skipped assignments. I was constantly on academic probation. Not that your grandmother would ever know, but at the time, I was thinking of doing what you were later accused of doing: selling all my belongings, sticking out my thumb, and hitchhiking to California to be with the other hippies who had dropped out and tuned in.

Everything changed when I met your mother. She made me want things that I had never dreamed of wanting: a steady job, a reliable car, a mortgage, a family. You figured out a long time ago that you got your wanderlust from me. I want you to know that this is what happens when you meet the person you are supposed to spend the rest of your life with: That restless feeling dissolves like butter. — Karin Slaughter

My whole life has been a very communal experience; growing up in a house full of happy hippies, having dinner parties three days a week, and going to Christiania, I was constantly surrounded by people celebrating community. If you look at the films I've done, they all share that theme. — Thomas Vinterberg

If you've never stayed at a hostel in Europe, consider yourself lucky. The sheets' stains look like a topographical map, and the mattresses feel like they've been through a Sharknado. You feel like you need a shower after you take a shower. And the wannabe hippies sleeping in the Che and anarchist shirts on the half-dozen bunks around you smell and snore and make you yearn for the relative opulence of an American truck stop. — Michelle Fields

Hippies are so phoney and fake. — George Harrison

As for those deserters, malcontents, radicals, incendiaries, the civil and uncivil disobedients among the young, SDS, PLP, Weathermen I and Weathermen II, the revolutionary action movement, the Black United Front, Yippies, Hippies, Yahoos, Black Panthers, Lions and Tigers alike - I would swap the whole damn zoo for a single platoon of the kind of young Americans I saw in Vietnam. — Spiro T. Agnew

I had learned that some people feel that books are "intrusive," in the sense that books put things in their heads that they don't want there. Some people call these things "ideas." Maybe they're right. Sometimes these ideas sprout into what are known as "thoughts," and you know my feelings about school, government, and big businesses
thoughts are the last things they want rattling around inside people's heads because thoughts inevitably lead to consumer protection, free speech and hippies. — Gary Reilly

Living on the street as a kid changed the way I looked at everything. It was a different time and while it had its dangers, it was nothing like it would be today. It was the Summer of Love and there was a real sense of community among us. We were hippies who looked out for each other instead of trying to rip each other off. We only had to watch out for the police who liked to roust us just on general principles, and the kids who came in from the suburbs to do a little hippie-bashing. — Charles De Lint

The hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too ... More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature ... As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side. — Francis A. Schaeffer

There was a lot of pretense floating around; not just with aunties and all that but with emotions and how people saw you. They had a point. There's a lot to learn from that generation
the stoic approach. I think it's disgusting how they've been forgotten about in this way. It's the American hippies' fault, they saw an in there, a way of making money out of bad moods. That's all it is most of the time. You can't expect to feel cock-a-hoop every minute of every day. My mam and dad's generation understood this. They were just thankful the bombs had stopped threatening their lives. They just wanted to get on with living. — Mark E. Smith

Children, for whom suburban life was supposed to make wholesome little Johns and Wendys, became the acid-dropping, classroom-burning hippies of the 1960s. — Ronald Steel

The starry-eyed idealists of today have submerged their critical faculties beneath a tidal wave of slop marketed by those old hippies who now sell a user-friendly dilution of their original enlightenment. — Peter J. Carroll

If the mountains fell in the sea,
Let it be, it ain't me.
Got my own world to live through
And I ain't gonna copy you. Now, if 6 turned up to be 9,
I don't mind, I don't mind.
If all the hippies cut off their hair,
I don't care, I don't care.
Did, 'cos I got my own world to live through
And I ain't gonna copy you. — Jimi Hendrix

Hippies generally aren't busy with anything except feeling sorry for themselves. — Robert Anton Wilson

My parents are definitely reformed hippies. — Alison Brie

Though it's frequently portrayed as this crazy, unbridled festival of rain-soaked, stoned hippies dancing in the mud, Woodstock was obviously much more than that - or we wouldn't still be talking about it in 2009. People of all ages and colors came together in the fields of Max Yasgur's farm. — Richie Havens

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed. — Jonathan Lethem

For the first five years of my life, I grew up in a log cabin in coastal British Columbia in a very small town, like 300 people, mostly hippies. No running water, no electricity. When I was 12, I changed my name from Dharma to Stewart. At that age, you just want to be normal. — Stewart Butterfield

Nothing like being scolded by a hippie. — Sarah Dessen

So this general with the background in intelligence who is supposed to conquer Afghanistan can't even figure out what Rolling Stone is? We're not talking Guns & Ammo here; we're talking the antiwar hippie magazine. — Maureen Dowd

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 grew up in Northern California, so the hippies were still around. My father and mother were very Republican, very strait-laced and very uptight, but my uncles were hippies. — Grant Show

Despite the elder-hippie vibe, she was so attractive that I assumed we must be related. — Rick Riordan

When I was a child, I enjoyed thinking about the future, and especially
loved to imagine flying around in one of those cool bubble cars I'd seen
on The Jetsons cartoons. Here we are, fifty years later, and we have the same
gas- and oil-guzzling motor vehicles, the same basic planes, the same trains,
the same utility companies to monitor and charge for our electricity, gas, and
water usage. Jimmy Carter talked a lot about new sources of energy back in
the 1970s. So did some of the hippies. And yet, decades later, there has been
little progression on this front. — Donald Jeffries

Within a few weeks, she was a full-blown hippie Christian, living at the House of Zaccheus and attending St. Luke's Episcopal Church, which struck her as "so cool" because they could be "dressed like hippies" and yet "come to church."30 — Larry Eskridge

I have busted more hippies' noses than all the narcs in the free world. — Ted Nugent

Fear that I was very different from everyone else. Fear that deep down inside I was a shallow fraud, that after the revolution or after Jesus came down to straighten everything out, everyone from hippies to hard-hats would unfold and blossom into the beautiful people they were while I would remain a gnarled little wart in the corner, oozing bile and giving off putrid smells. — Mark Vonnegut

Gadgets are the new drugs and we are GIPPIES (Gadget Hippies). — Saurabh Sharma

I saw the comics in the East Village Other, and they weren't superhero comics, they were all about hippies and all about things hippies were interested in. And there was one page in particular, a full page strip called "Gentle's Trip Out" signed "Panzika", and it was totally, totally psychedelic, and really, I don't know if it made any sense at all but it looked so great, and I thought, "This is what I want to do, this is my big influence," and it was. — Trina Robbins

I used to say, 'Mad' takes on both sides.' We even used to rake the hippies over the coals. They were protesting the Vietnam War, but we took aspects of their culture and had fun with it. 'Mad' was wide open. — Al Feldstein

Singapore had taken a much more, well, Singaporean approach to the problem of hippies than the Malaysians had. They'd let them in, but only if they got a haircut. — Peter Moore

For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies. — Chuck Palahniuk

The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes and switchblades. — Alice Cooper

My parents were hippies. They met at an ashram, where they were studying how to be enlightened. — Paulo Costanzo

The sixties?All right if you happened to have money. All right if you happened to know the right people. All right if you happened to live in London. But if you were poor, working class and lived anywhere else, then forget it. The sixties never happened. — C.J. Stone

Bezos is super smart; don't get me wrong. He just makes ordinary control freaks look like stoned hippies. — Steve Yegge

He wasn't like some of the hippies in England, where the qualification to rebel is planted by the guilt raised from being a spoilt child with a good education. He was a real hippy born from being forced to kill for his army until he was twenty one. He had long hair because the army made him shave his head. The army made him shave every day too. Now he had a beard. His face for a long time was not his own. When this guy said he was all about peace he wasn't talking about peace because his mum never got him the horse he wanted for his eighteenth birthday, he was talking about peace because he'd seen war. He talked about love because he knew hate: hate for those above him, hate for those he had served with, hate for enemies not born his but who became so and, lastly, hate for himself for how his mind had been controlled. — Craig Stone

Bonobo studies started in the '70s and came to fruition in the '80s. Then in the '90s, all of a sudden, boom, they ended because of the warfare in the Congo. It was really bad for the bonobo and ironic that people with their warfare were preventing us from studying the hippies of the primate world. — Frans De Waal

Waternish Estate was sold to a Dutchman in the 1960s when Bad-tempered Donald died. In turn, the Dutchman sold a part of the estate to the Scottish singer-songwriter Donovan. Donovan was the first of the British musicians to adopt the flower-power image. He is most famous for the psychedelically fabulous smash hits "Sunshine Superman," "Season of the Witch" and "The Fat Angel," and for being the first high-profile British pop star to be arrested for the possession of marijuana. Donovan has a history of being deeply groovy and of being most often confused with Bob Dylan, which reportedly annoys Donovan quite a lot. "Sometime in the early seventies, Bob Dylan bought part of the estate," Mum tells me. "But he put a water bed on the second floor of the house for whatever it is these hippies get up to, and it came crashing through the ceiling." "Not Bob Dylan," I say. "Donovan." "Who?" Mum says. — Alexandra Fuller

I'm too young and ridiculous a person to speak for my generation, but I'd be happy to talk about my own experiences as a generation Y writer. I was raised by a generation of hippies. Throughout my childhood, teachers urged me to fight the establishment. My English teacher assigned Ginsberg and Kerouac and declared Bob Dylan "a genius." My science teacher told me that television was "the new opiate of the masses" and bragged about never having owned one. My drama teacher made us perform Beckett. — Simon Rich

Their nineteen-sixties with the flowers in the guns and their summers of love, as if all we'd had was winter, all we'd had was rations. Just very good at keeping quiet, is what we were. We had to be. It was the way. Them with their jet-age. — Ali Smith

They were weird. They were hippies. They were the only hippies I knew so I didn't know if they were weird hippies. — Kristen Ashley

All hippies around now just represent complete apathy. — Joe Strummer

The appropriation of radical thinking by lazy, self-obsessed hippies is a public relations disaster that could cost the earth. — Ben Elton

My parents are hippies, so I must have a bit of hippie in me. — Josh Hartnett

To me, the counterculture was always what I grew up with the hippies in the late '60s. But, however you define it, it's really the excesses of youth and it's something that everyone goes through to some extent. Or if they don't, they should do. — Derek Ridgers

For some hippies, this vision could only be realised by rejecting scientific progress as a false God and returning to nature. Others, in contrast, believed that technological progress would inevitably turn their libertarian principles into social fact. Crucially, influenced by the theories of Marshall McLuhan, these technophiliacs thought that the convergence of media, computing and telecommunications would inevitably create the electronic agora - a virtual place where everyone would be able to express their opinions without fear of censorship. Despite being a middle-aged English professor, McLuhan preached the radical message that the power of big business and big government would be imminently overthrown by the intrinsically empowering effects of new technology on individuals. — Richard Barbrook

I've always despised the hippies. — John Lydon