James Lovelock Quotes

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

I think the greatest legacy of the 1960s was the general feeling that not only can you fight the powers that be, but you can win.

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.

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

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

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

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.

'Dreamers' was because I really wanted to go back after I heard so much nonsense about '68. I wanted to go back to what for me was '68, when young people thought that they could change the world.

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.

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

A lot of my idealism was frustrated by the end of the '60s because of the way things went with the assassinations and the sense that the political establishment was so fixed in its ways you couldn't change anything.

On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

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

A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldn't have happened without the social changes.

Disruption of the New Left

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

The Occupy Wall Street project feels like a burning ember that might light the torch of justice and inflame our longing for freedom.

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 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.

At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.

What I felt at that time - we're talking about '61 - was that I couldn't remember seeing a film that reflected the age we were living in.

You couldn't have fed the '50s into a computer and come out with the '60s.

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

'Easy Rider' was never a motorcycle movie to me. A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.