Jennifer Egan Quotes

Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.

The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.

I hitched up to Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, you know? And I was very much politically aligned with that whole mentality, the whole ideology of that generation, the music, the culture, the behavior.

If you were around in the '60s, you already know that music and art and love are a critical part of the revolution. This is how we fight.

I think the '60s were an extraordinary time. I feel bad for the kids today who missed this wonderful confluence, which was simultaneously a confluence of the global and the mythological.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

I was 21 in 1968, so I'm as much a child of the '60s as is possible to be. In those years the subject of religion had really almost disappeared; the idea that religion was going to be a major force in the life of our societies, in the West anyway, would have seemed absurd in 1968.

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

The hippie era was a wonderful time because we still believed we could make the world a better place.

When the mid-'70s came around, it looked like, 'Oh-oh, here come the punks.' But if you look closely at The Who and The Kinks, the anger and the frustration is there... There is, within me, just the same social discontent as I go through my career. But to be typecast as a singer of peace and love is fine.

Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come.

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

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.

But the whole point of the Sixties was that you had to take people as they were. If you came in with us you left your class, and colour, and religion behind, that was what the Sixties was all about.

I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.

There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.

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

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.

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

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

I'm a child of the Sixties.

I grew up in a hippie commune so I have a real hippie part of me.

The 90's are the 60's standing on their head.

Certainly there's a huge appeal to the '60s, because it was such a big turning point to everyone. It was the era of change, the boiling point. People rebelled against things - the hippies, the feminists, the protesters. All these things just built up and boiled over. I think people can relate to that today.

The whole 1960s thing was a ten-year running party, which was lovely. It started at the end of the 1950s and sort of faded a bit when it became muddled with flower power. It was marvelous.