Donald McCaig Quotes

The rude, raw, 'let it all hang out' freedom of the Californian hippies was in fact the most censorious and oppressive of societies that I have encountered.

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.

There's nothing wrong with being a hippie.

I saw the best minds of my generation who threw their watches off the roof to cast their ballot for Eternity outside of Time, & alarm clocks fell on their heads every day for the next decade.

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

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

'Punk' doesn't mean Mohawks and safety pins. It's about not conforming.

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats.

If there is anything the nonconformist hates worse than a conformist, it's another nonconformist who doesn't conform to the prevailing standard of nonconformity.

It's very cliched to go, 'You're not punk.' We don't care if we are, and we don't care if we aren't.

Punk was a protest against work and against boredom. It was a sign of life, a rant, a scream, a rejection of bourgeois morals. But have things improved since then? Arguably, they've got worse.

I wore a coat and tie all through high school: my way of being rebellious in the late 1950s.

I'm going to do everything I can to keep from being mainstream.

Hippy people had a hopeful idea of what they wanted the world to be like, then most of them changed into corporate Yuppies. But I still have that hippy thing underneath somewhere.

Punk was more based on social change than on music, so it didn't bother me too much. It wasn't really a musical threat.

I have really never aligned myself with hipsterdom or coolness.

The motif of Beat Generation is basically misunderstood, a misinterpreted area. There's this superimposition of the idea of a social rebellion, which was the communist interpretation through Lawrence Lipton.

People can have their punk ideals, but I don't really care about that kind of thing.

You can't be a punk all your life.

I remember at school one day there was a vocabulary list on the chalkboard, and the word 'nonconformist' was on there, and it said, 'Someone that doesn't appeal to society, someone who doesn't fit in.' We had this whole conversation about it, and I realized it cohered to the punk-rock world that I was into.

It depends on who you talk to if I'm part of the establishment or part of the antiestablishment.

I didn't do anything with the thought that I want to go against society or bend any rules.

If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

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

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives