Sean Lennon Quotes

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we're doing is not that. But it's partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.

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

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.

Cultural change always precedes political change.

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

But times changed, and I changed, and I didn't feel that way anymore. The Beatles were happening. I think that was probably the main thing. The Beatles just changed the whole world of music.

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

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

Don't underlook the Sixties; we started eating more vegetables, respecting women, and we shut down Vietnam. We did a lot of good stuff. But it shouldn't shut you down from the moment.

'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.

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

We weren't radical chic. Jane Fonda embarrassed me. We belonged to no political parties. Basically, we were vaudevillians.

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.

When cultural movements happen, it's so beyond your control.

So many big magazines just dissed the whole punk thing as nothing, but really, it was a big thing. It really changed, and that's what we wanted to do - change the system.

We came out in the midst of the hippie hangover. All this mellow music.

I remember the youth movement in 1968. It started on American university campuses as a protest against the Vietnam war, then came to Paris, Frankfurt and Berlin. Within a year, you had an uprising of youth against their elders.

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

When I was young in the 1960s, all the world watched the youth. Everywhere was the sensation of wanting to break the chains but to do something beautiful. It is my privilege to have beauty always near me.