Patti Smith Quotes

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

For me, Memphis has always been a city that holds a great deal of meaning and also leads me to a lot of thinking. Besides Sun Studio, which helped put rock n' roll on the map all over the world, the legendary Stax Studio also called Memphis home.

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.

Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.

I had this image before Boy George, before the Beatles, before the Rolling Stones.

Dylan captured what was on a million minds and turned it into poetry. With 'Blowin' in the Wind' or 'The Times They Are A-Changin',' he set a whole new standard.

The protest songs of the 1960s and 70s managed to blend political and societal views with music from the heart.

I think the '60s were a time where they were singing about what was going on around them.

I think that N.W.A. picked up where Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have gone if they hadn't been assassinated.

By 27, Bob Dylan had already written 'Highway 61 Revisited,' the Beatles had released 'Rubber Soul,' Bruce Springsteen had recorded 'Born to Run' and U2 had delivered 'The Joshua Tree.'

Now I know I understand that it was Sgt. Pepper's Band, that put the sixties into song, where have all the heroes gone?

I love the Beatles, and when I was very young, I had young parents, so Led Zeppelin and Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles constantly were big influences on my life.

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

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is marketing. You've got a bunch of faceless people in a back room who trademark a name that sounds very official. Well, if you had thought of it first, you would have been the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

But the whole point of the Sixties was that you had to take people as they were. If you came in with us you left your class, and colour, and religion behind, that was what the Sixties was all about.

And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

I used to think we were going to win in the '60s. Nixon went out and I thought we won.

My entire life, socially, was all around the Maggie era. That was the great challenge as a Sex Pistol was how to deal with Margaret Thatcher. I think we did rather good.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part - when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn't know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.

Dick Clark really didn't make rock 'n roll safe for America, as many people think.

A war still rages over the legacy of the 1960s.

In the '60s, I used to love rock magazines; I'd cut out pictures of Bob Dylan and John Lennon.

The music I listened to as a kid - the Stones, the Beatles - that was so rebellious at the time, it became mainstream.

New York City has more rock history in its 305 square miles than most of America combined.