John Lydon Quotes

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

North American leftists just keep trying to relive the '60s, or to make the '60s happen again.

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.

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

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

I remember the youth movement in 1968. It started on American university campuses as a protest against the Vietnam war, then came to Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin. Within a year, you had an uprising of youth against their elders.

I was part of a generation that changed the world, and it was taken over by posers.

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.

I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we're doing is not that. But it's partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.

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

And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.

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 hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

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

There was a time for German stars in the 1950s with Curt Jurgens, Hardy Kruger, O. W. Fischer, and Maria Schell. That was a totally different generation. It all ended in 1968 during the big students' movement in my country. It was an anti-authority movement that changed everything. All my country's hierarchies, morals and values were questioned.

It's going to be a combination Scopes trial, revolution in the streets, Woodstock Festival and People's Park, all rolled into one.

I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win.

The revolution has always been in the hands of the young. The young always inherit the revolution.

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.

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.

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

Having recorded his first album, 'Tapestry,' in 1969, in Berkeley, California, during the student riots, McLean, a native New Yorker, became a kind of weather vane for what he called the 'generation lost in space.'

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.