Abbie Hoffman Quotes

I always knew the Sixties wasn't a revolution. It really was just a bunch of university students with wealthy parents having fun.

I first got involved in theater in 1968, at the height of a social tumult. I was a poet.

You'd have to give people free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more.

I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.

I felt Clinton represented the worst of the 1960s.

The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.

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.

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.

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

Revolts, republics, revolutions, most no graver than a schoolboy’s barring out.

Disruption of the New Left

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.

The uproar of the late '60s - the antiwar movement, black riots, angry women. It was a wonderful time.

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

I remember being in Washington for high school when the city was on fire and those were troubling times, the Vietnam War, the protests.

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.

One of the things we know now that we didn't know then, is that revolutions are very painful to a lot of people. And that at the stage that we have evolved to now, a revolution would be extremely painful.

The life before '68 was very different from the life after '68. Before '68, our days were full of authoritarian moments. There were authorities everywhere. In fact, the movement of '68 was young people against their authorities, children against their parents. And that remained. The most important thing of all, the thing that lasted, was the first feminist movement and the position of women in society. That completely changed and that was very, very important.

I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam war and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out.

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

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 didn't like the '60s because it was too important what people who had nothing to do with the war thought about it.

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

There is no chance of a revolution in Georgia.