Timothy Leary Quotes

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.

The ’60s was the last time when large groups of people in the West searched for alternative modes of being. In a society like India’s, which is still not fully modern or totally organized, and has a great deal of tolerance for otherness in general, they find the cultural license to try other things, to be whatever they want to be.

I don't really give a f**k about the mainstream. The mainstream doesn't offer me anything. Why would I offer it anything? I love the world I have. I love the sort of subculture that Green Day represents.

I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie.

'Punk' doesn't mean Mohawks and safety pins. It's about not conforming.

Punk allowed women to stop looking feminine. Oh, the relief.

Hippy people had a hopeful idea of what they wanted the world to be like, then most of them changed into corporate Yuppies. But I still have that hippy thing underneath somewhere.

I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.

The punk era, at its best, celebrated questioning the norm and the promotion of originality. Both concepts have always resonated with me.

My attraction to the Church of Satan... is the same thing that initially attracted me to punk rock. It was something that wasn't very entirely popular, and it was sort of like the adversary to mainstream culture and beliefs.

I think there's a whole group of kids out there that don't relate to the glitz and glamour of hanging out in clubs and partying all the time. So I think some people are just more real than that, and I think our fans are those kind of kids that need something to relate to, and I think we're the band to do it.

It's like our little thing: you can take the girl out of the punk, but you can't take the punk out of the girl.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives

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

Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term.

The hippies had in mind something that they wanted, and were calling it freedom, but in the final analysis freedom is a purely negative goal. It just says something is bad. Hippies weren't really offering any alternatives other than colorful short-term ones, and some of these were looking more and more like pure degeneracy. Degeneracy can be fun but it's hard to keep up as a serious lifetime occupation.

Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration.

I'm just kind of a hippie. Age is not that relevant to the music.

I like the idea of playing people outside of society. That's where I tend to be drawn.

Drag wasn't always counterculture.

I'm not a flowerchild or anything like that... whatever it was.

I grew up in Berkeley and my parents were hippies, obviously, since my name's 'Jorma.' I didn't watch much television growing up because they weren't into it at all.

To me, punk is about being an individual and going against the grain and standing up and saying 'This is who I am'.

To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It's freedom.