Jane Birkin Quotes

I used to travel in tennis shoes; I am just not allowed to anymore. I'm an old hippie from San Francisco.

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.

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

The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.

I feel like I sort of missed the eighties. At the time, we didn't know we were having fun, which is probably the way it always is.

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.

I think I'm going to have to live vicariously through my daughter's rebellion because I certainly never did go through adolescence.

When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.

Has there ever been a society which has died of dissent? Several have died of conformity in our lifetime.

On our show, I must tell you, it was... the 60s was a period of time when everything was free love. People made love to each other. It was a very open life, you know?

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

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.

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

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

I'd loved to wear jeans and t-shirts, but everybody was in the peace movement back then. And that was my ploy. I had to be careful not to say things like 'I like meat.' Actually I just wanted to drink beer and to screw.

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

I was a rebellious adolescent. It was the '60s. Everyone was rebellious. I hated high school.

I was a little too young to be a hippie.

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.

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

Here we were supposedly changing the world for the better in the Sixties, but as we get 40 years further down the line, we realise that some of those changes such as the drugs probably weren't all that great or sensible. It was all about social experiments.

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

I was very, very lucky to spend my youth during the '60s.

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 new generation doesn't know anything about me except for what they saw in' Easy Rider.'