Sally Mann Quotes

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.

I could never turn to a guy and a girl and ask, 'Are you going steady?' That was absolutely a no-no - it was the Eisenhower period, and no parent wanted their kid going steady, so it wasn't a thing that you could endorse as proper behavior on the air.

I always say that even though my dad was alive during Woodstock, he was just not invited. He just seemed like he was from a different generation.

I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them.

And the young people in the 1960's identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.

My generation had the best years. We missed the Second World War and caught the outburst of rock 'n' roll.

A lot of the fiction I read growing up was post-war American, and not all of it centers on Manhattan, but around people of the Mad Men generation, people like John Cheever and, in more modern times, Don DeLillo, who I always mention.

My dad is a Deadhead, my mom's a Jewish-American princess from Jersey.

I think that I recall the nostalgic '50s: the start of early television and rock-and-roll, and I think everything seemed to get very generic. Not much has changed.

What I find interesting as a 40-year-old is the idea of trying to be a part of a pronounced, continuing independent culture. The basic tenet of America is that you rebel and then you get real.

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.

Sometime between when the Summer of Love ended and the Summer of Sam began, America became a nation of cynics about love.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

When the vast baby-boom generation exploded into adolescence in the 1960s, marketers exulted. Advertising consultants, always eager to coin a phrase, began happily explaining to corporations the difference between 'teenyboppers' and 'counterculture consumers.'

Everyone wants instant gratification: you have to have everything your parents had right away.

When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today.

Since the 1960s, mainstream media has searched out and co-opted the most authentic things it could find in youth culture, whether that was psychedelic culture, anti-war culture, blue jeans culture. Eventually heavy metal culture, rap culture, electronica - they'll look for it and then market it back to kids at the mall.

I guess I was the most unbohemian of all bohemians. My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with - ... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things.

In retrospect, we could see that the 1950s had been a reactionary period in America of Eisenhower blandness, of virulent anticommunism, of the 'Feminine Mystique.'

You'll hear 'Hippie,' or, 'Get a haircut.' I like it. I think it's funny because they think we've never heard that before. So, like, good one.

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.

The grown-up world was a very ordered society in the early '60s, and I was coming out of it. America was even more ordered than anywhere else. I found it was a very restrictive society in thought and behavior and dress.

This isn't the Democratic party of our fathers and grandfathers. This is the party of Woodstock hippies. I was at Woodstock--I built the stage. And when everything fell apart, and people were fighting for peanut butter sandwiches, it was the National Guard who came in and saved the same people who were protesting them. So when Hillary Clinton a few years ago wanted to build a Woodstock memorial, I said it should be a statue of a National Guardsman feeding a crying hippie.

Many teachers of the Sixties generation said "We will steal your children", and they did. A significant part of America has converted to the ideas of the 1960s - hedonism, self-indulgence and consumerism. For half of all Americans today, the Woodstock culture of the Sixties is the culture they grew up with - their traditional culture. For them, Judeo-Christian culture is outside the mainstream now. The counter-culture has become the dominant culture, and the former culture a dissident culture - something that is far out, and 'extreme'.

Our basic fundamental desires are overly stimulated. A friend of mine said, "you have a generation of people that have been accidentally marketed to."