John Cooper Clarke Quotes

I often think that the Greatest Generation gave birth to the Crappiest Generation, the stinky hippies with their slacktivism and demand for government welfare in the name of freedom.

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

I got into journalism because I came of age in the '60s. It just seemed one way for me to get things done.

You can't win for losing. Either you fulfill their stereotype of being a radical 60's person or you've sold out. In fact, of course, millions of people who were active in the 60's are doing work on issues that try to reflect their values.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

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.

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.

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

I certainly was one of the instigators in the 1960s of freedom of expression.

All hippies around now just represent complete apathy.

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.

The hippy movement was a failure. All hippies around now just represent complete apathy. There's a million good reasons why the thing failed, OK. But the only thing we've got to live with is that it failed.

The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government.

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.

We lived on anarchist farms, squatted in the inner city, and hopped rail cars. We wanted to see how other young people were creating meaning from their lives.

Our strategy should be not only to confront empire, but to lay siege to it. To deprive it of oxygen. To shame it. To mock it. With our art, our music, our literature, our stubbornness, our joy, our brilliance, our sheer relentlessness — and our ability to tell our own stories. Stories that are different from the ones we’re being brainwashed to believe. The corporate revolution will collapse if we refuse to buy what they are selling — their ideas, their version of history, their wars, their weapons, their notion of inevitability.

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.

If you were around in the '60s, you already know that music and art and love are a critical part of the revolution. This is how we fight.

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

I'm not any kind of social reformer.

Every generation has someone who steps outside the norm and offers a voice for the unspeakable attitudes of that time. I represent everything that's supposed to be wrong, everything that's forbidden.

I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.

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.

The truest form of any form of revolutionary Left, whatever you want to call it, was Jack Kerouac, E.E. Cummings, & Ginsberg's period. Excuse me, but that's where it was at.