Cultural Upheaval Quotes

The crises that has overtaken Europe not of Europe only but of humanity and will not pass like other crises and wars, leaving the essential structure of the present day world intact.

I feel that the social revolution of the sixties is like a revolving door that came our way, and then left. It's back again.

Society was passing through a most critical stage. The French Revolution had diseased the imagination and unsettled the understanding of men everywhere. The old foundations of social order, loyalty, tradition, habit, reverence for antiquity, were everywhere shaken, if not subverted. The authority of the past was gone.

I feel that we are currently living in a world that is similar to late '50s, early '60s kind of world.

Reactionary movements can't sustain themselves unless they find something new to catch and burn on.

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

The '60s was a time of unthinkabilities.

I think '60s are appealing to creative people, because it seemed to be a time of endless possibilities, when the boundaries of what could be considered popular culture were being expanded almost by the week. It doesn't feel like that anymore. At times, I wish it were so. Radio is a perfect example; good God, I mean, back then the most interesting songs were also hits, and that's just not true anymore. It hasn't been true in a long time.

All bonafide revolutions are of necessity revolutions of the spirit.

I was just as crazy as everybody else post-Watergate, post-Vietnam.

I feel like the sixties is about to happen. It feels like a period in the future to me, rather than a period in the past.

A century of convulsive change leaves huge demographic gouge marks.

Back then, in 1968, everything was suspect - family, government, and obviously the family unit in 'Night of the Living Dead' completely collapses. That's what we were focused on.

Cultural transformation announces itself in sputtering fits and starts, sparked here and there by minor incidents, warmed by new ideas that may smolder for decades. In many different places, at different times, the kindling is laid for the real conflagration-the one that will consume the old landmarks and alter the landscape forever.

People don't know where they stand and what they're going to lose, and that makes things uncertain. The political parties try to meld people together, but then that becomes a problem. There are parallels here, to American cities, which, in the '80s, with massive rural to urban migration, saw incredible amounts of violence.

I felt just overwhelmed by input: the Vietnam war and the collapse of the '60s and the proliferation of media' it just felt like everything was too much to handle and you just tuned out.

His [Andy warhol] films were way ahead of the times...and I'm not suggesting this has all necessarily been a good thing for America, mind you. I kind of think we're all in a really big mess, kind of like the end days of the Roman Empire.

I lived in France during the '60s. I was there from the early '60s until 1970, so my view of the '60s is more global. It was a time of tremendous transition, not only for America but for the whole world.

The fortunes of the entire world may well ride on the ability of young Americans to face the responsibilities of an old America gone mad.

Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.

The clatter of a changing world is not pleasant, and those who have enjoyed the comforts and protection of the old order may be shocked and unhappy when they behold the vigorous young builders of a new world sweeping away their time-honored antiquities.

I don't think that Women's Liberation will change much though -- not because there is anything wrong with their aims, but because it is already clear that the whole world is being shaken into a new pattern by the cataclysms we are living through: probably by the time we are through, if we do get through at all, the aims of Women's Liberation will look very small and quaint.

During and shortly after puberty human beings have an indubitable tendency to loosen their allegiance to all traditional rites and social norms of their culture

Immigration along with nonwhite birthrates will make white people a minority totally vulnerable to the political, social, and economic will of blacks, Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Orientals. A social upheaval is now beginning to occur that will be the funeral dirge of the America we love. I shudder to contemplate the future under nonwhite occupation; rapes, murders, robberies multiplied a hundred fold, illiteracy such as in Haiti, medicine such as in Mexico, and tyranny such as in Togoland.

But it is possible that, in the days ahead, these years we have lived through may eventually be thought of simply as a period of disturbance and regression.