Jerry Saltz Quotes

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

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

'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.

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

The 1960s were really a life-changing time.

I think the '60s were an extraordinary time. I feel bad for the kids today who missed this wonderful confluence, which was simultaneously a confluence of the global and the mythological.

I lived in France during the '60s. I was there from the early '60s until 1970, so my view of the '60s is more global. It was a time of tremendous transition, not only for America but for the whole world.

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

The '60s was a time of unthinkabilities.

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.

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.

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

Students in the '60s were responsible for great changes, politically and socially.

In retrospect, the political and cultural climate in the early '60s seems both a time of innocence and also like a sultry, still summer day in the Midwest: an unsettling calm before a ferocious storm over Vietnam, which was not yet an American war.

I helped make the Sixties swing, and I'm very proud of that.

Disruption of the New Left

When America became stigmatized in the '60s as racist, sexist and militaristic, it wanted moral authority above all else.

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.

Nineteen sixty-eight was one exciting moment in a much larger movement. It spawned a whole range of movements. There wouldn't have been an international global solidarity movement, for instance, without the events of 1968. It was enormous, in terms of human rights, ethnic rights, a concern for the environment, too.

Let's face it, us '60s folks had pretty high expectations.

To talk about the '60s almost brings tears to my eyes. What we did. What we all did. We changed the world.

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.

Most of my memories of the Sixties are ones of optimism, high spirits and confidence.