Phil Ochs Quotes

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

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

I have busted more hippies' noses than all the narcs in the free world.

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

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.

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.

All hippies around now just represent complete apathy.

The reason why I am proud of my part in the punk movement is that I think it really did implant a message that was already there. The hippies told it to me, but punk made it something cool for people to stand up for, which is that we do not believe government, that we are against government.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

I can relax with bums because I am a bum. I don't like laws, morals, religions, rules. I don't like to be shaped by society.

We lived on anarchist farms, squatted in the inner city, and hopped rail cars. We wanted to see how other young people were creating meaning from their lives.

Somewhere in the '60s, actors became wimps and basket-case psychotics.

(Punk rock is) lunging after some glimpse of a new and better world.

You have the establishment and then you have the hippies revolting against the establishment, and what you end up getting are like accountants with long hair. And that's kind of what happened with the youth movement in the '70s.

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.

The early 1970s was a time when illegal acts were in style. Everybody was going nuts with causes, most of them against the law.

Every generation has someone who steps outside the norm and offers a voice for the unspeakable attitudes of that time. I represent everything that's supposed to be wrong, everything that's forbidden.

Initially, electronic music was anti-establishment, as punk rock and rock n' roll were. The music was shut down; the police were against the parties.

As I say, the Animals had a particular concept of themselves as a band. There was an anarchic spirit in it, which was being flattened by commercial designs, attitudes, and needs.

I'm compared to Kerouac, I suppose, because he traveled and rejected middle-class values, but the similarities end there.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

Every genuine boy is a rebel and an anarch. If he were allowed to develop according to his own instincts, his own inclinations, society would undergo such a radical transformation as to make the adult revolutionary cower and cringe.

I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.

My parents were hippies.