Merle Haggard Quotes

[ Vietnam War] brought the people together and made the '60s like they were. The youth were very unified against the status quo - against the old line and the new old line. It's the same exact thing today.

I feel blessed in the knowledge that I probably belong to the last generation that will remember what we call "traditional America."

I arrived in San Francisco in January 1951. After the Second World War, the population was so uprooted. Soldiers came back home for brief periods and took off again. So the population was very fluid, and suddenly it was as if the continent tilted west. The whole population slid west. It took 10 years for America to coalesce into a new culture. And the new culture happened in San Francisco, not New York.

I'm really fascinated with anything that takes place between the 1920s up through the 1960s. In some ways it feels familiar, and in other ways it feels like it's from another planet.

Baseball is what we were, and football is what we have become.

The 1970s, the decade of my teenage years, was a transitional period in American youth culture.

At the time the world was all upside down. The American people were beginning to move around a lot. The old hometown ties had been pretty much broken. The theme of Farmer Takes a Wife appealed to people. Everybody was homesick. And it sold and sold and sold.

I turned a lot of people in white America - and not just white America, but middle-class America - into hip-hoppers, you know?

The real 1960s began on the afternoon of November 22, 1963. It came to seem that Kennedy's murder opened some malign trap door in American culture, and the wild bats flapped out.

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

Something is happening to Britain and the British. Or has happened. We are said to be passing through a transition, or a turning point, or a transformation; nobody is quite sure which.

The ideal American type is perfectly expressed by the Protestant, individualist, anti-conformist, and this is the type that is in the process of disappearing. In reality there are few left.

A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldn't have happened without the social changes.

The End of White Christian America

Mourning the loss of the phone call is like pining for buggy driving or women in hats or three-martini lunches. They've gone.

When cultural movements happen, it's so beyond your control.

Let's face it, us '60s folks had pretty high expectations.

The late 1960s was another time and another world.

I believe in the country America used to be.

And all the things I thought were mistakes and I did cartoons on them. And then I think I was the first cartoonist in the country to attack the war in Viet Nam and that helped influence a whole generation of young cartoonists who later on took up the battle. And that was exciting to know that I had helped influence work of young people who were moving this forum into a better and more exciting area, out of the more by the state that political cartooning had been in.

Things have not changed as much as we would like to think they have. Or maybe we're just in another one of the divided moments in the country. The late '60s certainly was one of them, the Civil War being another, but I'm hard-pressed to think of too many.

In fact, it's pretty dramatic when you get to 1975, very revealing, the [Vietnam] war ends. Everybody had to write something about the war, what it meant. You also had polls of public opinion, and they're dramatically different.

Elvis Presley's death deprives our country of a part of itself. He was unique, irreplaceable. More than twenty years ago, he burst upon the scene with an impact that was unprecedented and will probably never be equaled. His music and his personality, fusing the styles of white country and black rhythm and blues, permanently changed the face of American popular culture. His following was immense. And he was a symbol to people the world over of the vitality, rebelliousness and good humor of this country.

I realized how for all of us who came of age in the late sixties and early seventies the war was a defining experience. You went o r you didn't, but the fact of it and the decisions it forced us to make marked us for the rest of our lives, just as the depression and World War II had marked my parents.

After world war all we got was a lot of conformity, and conservatism and when I was in college at the university of Illinois the skirt lengths dropped instead of going up as they had during the roaring twenties and I knew that was a very bad sign, and it is symbolic and reflective of a very repressive time, and some of that was laid the feet of the cold war.