Mick Jagger Quotes

I don't know why people keep banging on about the '60s. I came from a conventional family and I didn't go off with different people - I rather wish I had now, seeing all the fun everyone else was having.

What I find interesting as a 40-year-old is the idea of trying to be a part of a pronounced, continuing independent culture. The basic tenet of America is that you rebel and then you get real.

When I grew up in the '60s, we were actually dominated by this, you know, sort of conforming '50s culture, even though we were like trying to express our own culture, like, the dominant culture was the thing that was forming us. And I think that that's true today.

This is the story of America. Everybody's doing what they think they're supposed to do.

America can be a very hysterical country intellectually and very puritanical, too. You probably have fun in private, but to the rest of the world you seem to hate fun - to be big on agendas and short on spontaneity. The image you present is one of appalling conformity. The thought police is what you are ruled by.

I feel that America is essentially against the artist, that the enemy of America is the artist, because he stands for individuality and creativeness, and that's un-American somehow.

The problem in this world is not civil disobedience...th e problem in this world is civil obedience.

If the people be led by laws, and uniformity sought to be given them by punishments, they will try to avoid the punishment, but have no sense of shame.

It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can.

We do not make a world of our own, but fall into institutions already made, and have to accommodate ourselves to them to be useful at all.

During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.

The largest cultural menace in America is the conformity of the intellectual cliques which, in education as well as the arts, are out to impose upon the nation their modish fads and fallacies, and have nearly succeeded in doing so. In this cultural issue, we are, without reservations, on the side of excellence (rather than "newness") and of honest intellectual combat (rather than conformity).

"Old" is definitely not cool in America. Never has been.

In a mad world it always seems simpler to obey.

I have always thought that if we began for one moment to say what we thought, society would collapse.

Everything's getting homogenized. It seems to me like music and behavior and everything else is getting homogenized.

The idea of a government is to create an ordered, willing work force where there's no trouble. I think idlers are generally seen as potentially dangerous because they're asking questions.

Everybody in America is a part of this big herd of cattle being led to the marketplace, not to be sold, which is usual with cattle, but to do the buying. And everyone is branded.

The first thing that struck me on landing in America was that if the Americans are not the most well-dressed people in the world, they are the most comfortably dressed.

Conformism is so hot on the heels of the mass-produced avant-garde that the 'ins' and the 'outs' change places with the speed of mach 3.

In America we have across the country, the entire world.

Baseball was a metaphor for America, both here and in terms of how it was understood by the rest of the world.

The power of the culture industry's ideology is such that conformity has replaced consciousness

I want to know why, if men rule the world, they don't stop wearing neckties.

Where else but in America could the women's liberation movement take off their bras, then go on TV to complain about their lack of support?