1960s America Quotes

I was still in college when 'To Kill a Mockingbird' came out in 1960. I remember it had a kind of an electrifying effect on this country; this was a time when there were a lot of good books coming out.

I was a young man working in Omaha, Nebraska, in the mid-1960s when I received a call, and I was summoned to Atlanta to work at WSB. It was, for me, the beginning of a real education about the South.

I didn't know Jack Kennedy that well, but Bobby was a hero to me.

When I arrived in America, I experienced serious culture shock. For someone with a religious upbringing, the 1960s were an extremely difficult time. Even though religion was a big part of the civil rights and peace movements, in my college religion was treated as irrelevant, hopelessly stodgy, and behind the times.

You know, The Beach Boys' image is kinda like a group Doris Day, you know what I mean?

Going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.

'Easy Rider' was never a motorcycle movie to me. A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.

I took Bobby Kennedy through the delta and he cried like a baby.

[Spiro] Agnew was a small-time pol who became the most blatant crook to sit one heartbeat away from the presidency. He was a demagogue ranting ghost-written bile that split Americans amid the war and fires of the '60s. But political peers, sensing in Agnew's tumble their own fragility, always treated Spiro as gently as a museum vase.

I grew up in Columbia, Maryland, a planned community built during the sixties. During the early years, it was very integrated. I grew up being taught by black teachers with black principals and vice principals and, you know, a lot of black friends. We played in mixed groups, and I kind of thought that was how it was.

My story starts with my dad, a black boy born to a single mother in a small town in North Carolina. It starts with my parents meeting in Washington, D.C., in the '60s, at a time of incredible activism.

I was born in New York City, but I was raised in New Jersey, part of the great Jewish emigration of 1963.

I think 'In The Heat Of The Night' was one of the most influential films on me. Looking back now, I can see how influential it was on my screenwriting because here you have what looks to be a crime procedural, and it's actually a study in race and loneliness, and a perception of an era.

I was born in 1968 and grew up in my grandmother's house in suburban Connecticut, where I was convinced a ghost named Virgil lived in the attic.

I'm writing a movie about Mozart going to New York in the '60s. I've been reading so many novels.

I think 1960s small-town America was very Lynchian. Everything was there, but underneath, everything was rumbling.

The world fell apart. Sirhan Sirhan shot Bobby Kennedy. Why were people shooting all the Kennedys? Had the country gone mad?