Peter Coyote Quotes

Never trust a hippie. That's definitely my motto.

I hitched up to Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, you know? And I was very much politically aligned with that whole mentality, the whole ideology of that generation, the music, the culture, the behavior.

I'm not a flowerchild or anything like that... whatever it was.

But the whole point of the Sixties was that you had to take people as they were. If you came in with us you left your class, and colour, and religion behind, that was what the Sixties was all about.

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

I've always despised the hippies.

Hippies? Why, I'm the original.

At the time of Woodstock, I was just 13, but I used to see these exotic hippy creatures and I did look on with envy. How could you not? In an ideal world, I would have loved to have been a hippy - but I might have been a bit strait-laced. It was my fantasy.

I'm a child of the Sixties.

I think of the Sixties as being every man for himself.

On our show, I must tell you, it was... the 60s was a period of time when everything was free love. People made love to each other. It was a very open life, you know?

The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.

The whole 1960s thing was a ten-year running party, which was lovely. It started at the end of the 1950s and sort of faded a bit when it became muddled with flower power. It was marvelous.

I would say that we have not completely cracked the code of the '60s. We are still finding our way through that time.

In the Top 40, half the songs are secret messages to the teen world to drop out, turn on, and groove with the chemicals and light shows at discotheques.

Everyone look around and see if you can spot the NARCS. They're the ones who look like hippies.

My family were pretty big hippies.

Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.

I went from being a jock to a hippie. It was a very clear-cut decision. I had to be one or the other. I had to forsake that other aspect of myself. Or thought that I had to, which is regrettable. Quickly, I was back in the pine trees with the hippies, listening to my Jimi Hendrix and my Janis Joplin and turning on, tuning in, and dropping out.

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

I kind of feel stuck in the late-Sixties and early-Seventies.

The hippie era was a wonderful time because we still believed we could make the world a better place.

I grew up in that era of Hendrix and Joplin and The Doors, and the Summer of Love and Haight-Ashbury, and even the Panthers. That was my era; that's what I was into.

I'm a 1960s flowerchild who has refused to grow up.

And it may be that a crowd at a particular moment of history creates the object to justify its gathering, as it did at the first Human Be-In and Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Or it may be that two generations of war and surveillance had left people craving the embodiment of their own unease in the form of a lone, unsteady man on a slide guitar.