Pankaj Mishra Quotes

Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.

I'm not an anarchist any more. I still love the Sex Pistols, but I don't want to be a punk rocker all the time, but I do want to carry on exploring new forms of acting.

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've always been like a black hippie.

Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

Hetero - normative behavior and herd mentality is dangerous. It's okay to be different. It's okay to stand out for whatever reason. Some people are just born that way and instead of trying to tear them down, learn something new. Be curious and open because maybe that's a pathway out for you, too.

What I was talking about was, of course, very autobiographical - '68 was the moment when all the young people were incredibly excited, because when we were going to sleep, we knew we would wake up not tomorrow, but in the future. There was a sense of future that was the result of the mixture of politics, cinema, music, the first joints. And the movies were a very important part of that cocktail.

The best and only authentic book written on the sixties underground.

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.

Drag wasn't always counterculture.

I'm not just influenced by the '60s - it's who I am. I grew up with Allen Ginsberg and Che Guevara. I flirted with various forms of communism when it was way out of style. It was this really strange and creative time in music and culture, and it was fabulous.

I never liked feeling like the world needed to have labels on everything, whether it's people or categories of music. I think everyone should be what they want to be, and you shouldn't have to look a certain way in order to fit this mold or that mold.

Here we were supposedly changing the world for the better in the Sixties, but as we get 40 years further down the line, we realise that some of those changes such as the drugs probably weren't all that great or sensible. It was all about social experiments.

I've always been very curious about fringe cultures where people temporarily adopt a different social model or way of presenting themselves.

The class barricades have been stormed by the forces of a broad culture, which is made up of clusters of individuals who have decided for themselves what they will be in society.

I had a hot-pink mohawk in high school, and when I came out everyone was like, 'We don't care.'

Sometimes I get a lot of stuff, being in Houston, being in a conservative place, and wearing weird stuff that I wear. People don't get it sometimes. I like it.

In the West, we have been withdrawing from our tradition-, religion-, and even nation-centred cultures.

Sometimes I feel like I was born in the wrong year - I think it would have been cool to be alive in the '60s.

My advice to myself and to everyone else, particularly young people, is to turn on, tune in and drop out.

...culture is useless unless it is constantly challenged by counter culture. People create culture; culture creates people. It is a two-way street. When people hide behind a culture, you know that's a dead culture.

I'm talking about the '60s really. People go interview these guys and ask them, "Do you still think music can change the world?" I mean, go talk to Graham Nash about that. What's he going to tell you? Ask David Crosby. These guys are still out there. They're playing their hits at Staples Center and those are really valuable songs. I'm talking about a couple of the guys who got knee-deep into really believing music had a great service beyond radio. I believe it did. And I think a lot of those songs are great.

That's what the whole Sixties Flower-Power thing was about: 'Go away, you bunch of boring people.

Everyone tries to look a cookie-cutter kind of way, and actually the people who look different are the ones who get picked up.