James Comey Quotes

In the early sixties, we were strong, we were virulent.

You have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality.

I'm a child of the sixties, I'm a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution.

I've spent a lot of time in the United States and I'm not under any illusions that it's a crime-free nirvana. I'm well aware it has plenty of problems, though they seem to be associated with particular areas.

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

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.

The '60s was the end of the America that the rest of the world liked.

In 1962, the smallest things were upsetting to authority. It wasn't the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't the Anti-war Movement. It was something else, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.

It's very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

I remember the day Richard Nixon won in 1968. That was a time that seemed certain to bring about long awaited seismic change in America. But events of tragic proportion took us on a turn. Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. were suddenly dead.

I think future generations will say the late 20th century and the early 21st century was a time of great convulsions and upheavals.

I fear that some day or another we shall have in Europe a total upsetting of social order, which will drive all wise and experienced men to America.

Part of the attraction of the riots is the looting, which seems to be almost unrestrained. I always thought that when rioting breaks out, looters must be shot. Otherwise the situation will get entirely out of hand. [Lyndon] Johnson has made all the right gestures but it is exceedingly difficult to see any end to the tension, let alone the violence which seems to be in some way part of the American way of life.

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

Chicago, I feel, is a microcosm for the segregated, violent environment that is America. I try to not only speak about these things in music, but also try to address these things in real life tangibly with action.

I was reading newspaper front pages from the 1930s, and I was taken aback. I'm not naive about American history, but I was a bit knocked off my feet by things that used to be on the front pages of newspapers.

As far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.

The relationship between violence and nonviolence in this country is interesting. The fact of the matter is, you know, people do respond to riots. The 1968 Housing Act was in large response to riots that broke out after Dr. Martin Luther King was killed. They cited these as an actual inspiration.

Mr. President, the Black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.

Human agitation, with all the vulgarity of needs small and great, with its flagrant disgust for the police who repress it … that alone determines revolutionary mental forms

That policy was correct … That was 1957. It is now 1967.

J. Edgar Hoover’s counter-intelligence program was designed to prevent a Black Messiah from rising to unite the people.

Happy memories … need to be put in context. I have interviewed many white people who have fond memories of their lives in the 1950s and early 1960s. The ones who never cross examined these memories to get at the complexities were the ones most hostile to the Civil Rights and the Women’s Movements, which they saw as destroying the harmonious world they remembered.

The student protests of the 1960s were partly the outcome of the hypertrophy of the university and the resulting shortcoming in higher education.

The vitality of democracy in the 1960s, raised questions about the governability of democracy in the 1970s.