The 1960s Counterculture Quotes

1. "I think I was lucky to come of age in a place and time - the American South in the 1960s and '70s - when the machine hadn't completely taken over life. The natural world was still the world, and machines - TV, telephone, cars - were still more or less ancillary, and computers were unheard of in everyday life."
Author: Ben Fountain

2. "The game business arose from computer programs that were written by and for young men in the late 1960s and early 1970s. They worked so well that they formed a very lucrative industry fairly quickly. But what worked for that demographic absolutely did not work for most girls and women."
Author: Brenda Laurel

3. "Music isn't like news, where it's what happened five minutes ago or even 10 seconds ago that matters. With music, a song from the 1960s could be as relevant to someone today as the latest Ke$ha song."
Author: Daniel Ek

4. "[T]he new weird represents a productive experiment in fantasy fiction. The New Wave of the 1960s and 1970s arguably embodied science fiction's claim to literary 'seriousness.' This desire for seriousness is not snobbery, as sometimes suggested by folks who overemphasize the entertainment function of speculative fiction; it's about recognition of the vast possibilities within the field."
Author: Darja Malcolm Clarke

5. "Although it has become the most visible of American suburban landscapes, the edge node has few architectural defenders. Even developers despair: 'Shopping centers built only in the 1960s are already being abandoned. Their abandonment brings down the values of nearby neighbourhoods. Wal-Marts built five years ago are already being abandoned for superstores. We have built a world of junk, a degraded environment. It may be profitable for a short-term, but its long-term economic prognosis is bleak.' -Dolores Hayden quoting Robert Davis, 'Postscript,' in Congress for the New Urbanism, Charter of the New Urbanism, 2002."
Author: Dolores Hayden

6. "...the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too... More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature... As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side."
Author: Francis August Schaeffer

7. "The 1980s witnessed radical advances in the theorisation of the study of literature in the universities. It had begun in France in the 1960s and it made a large impact on the higher education establishments of Britain and America. New life was breathed into psychoanalytic and Marxist theory, while structuralism gave way to post-structuralism. The stability of the text as a focus of study was challenged by deconstruction, a theory developed by the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, which represented a complete fracture with the old liberal-formalist mode of reading. Coherence and unity were seen as illusory and readers were liberated to aim at their own meanings. Hardy's texts were at the centre of these theoretical movements, including one that came to prominence in the 1980s, feminism."
Author: Geoffrey Harvey

8. "It was in the 1960s that I began the detailed study of public regulation."
Author: George Stigler

9. "Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)"
Author: Harold Bloom

10. "Many young men in the 1960s and 1970s came to reject some of the traditional ideas about manhood that many of their fathers tried to pass down - like unquestioning respect for authority even when that might mean killing and dying for questionable or unjust causes such as the Vietnam War."
Author: Jackson Katz

11. "The Pill was introduced in the early 1960s and modern woman was born. Women were no longer going to be tied to the cycle of endless babies; they were going to be themselves. With the Pill came what we now call the sexual revolution. Women could, for the first time in history, be like men, and enjoy sex for its own sake. In the late 1950s we had eighty to a hundred deliveries a month on our books. In 1963 the number had dropped to four or five a month. Now that is some social change!"
Author: Jennifer Worth

12. "If you spend any time in Washington you'll find nerds. What happens is most of them sublimate their fixations with comics, or baseball cards, or 1960s British comedies to policy minutiae and political arcana. But, like Christians in ancient Rome, you can still spot them if you know the signals."
Author: Jonah Goldberg

13. "Too few of us from the Black Power generation and the movements to take power in cities through the election of black elected officials have told our story. Hence there is very little understanding of the agenda for change we outlined for black people and America in the 1960s and early 1970s. We wanted self-determination, and end to racism, and economic security. It is an agenda that was never fulfilled, and hence the title of my book, Unfinished Agenda."
Author: Junius Williams

14. "In the Catskills, nostalgia runs backwards. The upwardly mobile Jewish masses of the 1950s and 1960s have been replaced by the Jews of 19th century Poland."
Author: Kevin Haworth

15. "I feel like a 1960s graduate student. I still work on note cards. I've never found a better system."
Author: Lawrence Wright

16. "The counterculture had sought to practice the idea that creative personal expression was the essence of an authentic existence. The WELL, drawing strength from the Internet culture's belief that the market contains all values, put personal expression up for sale."
Author: Lee Siegel

17. "...if it was scandalous for girls in the 1960s to wear pants to school, what else will we look back on & shake our heads at? What else can't we see in the future? And at that, what else can we dream up?"
Author: Lisa Factora Borchers

18. "We were women in transition, raised in one era and coming of age in another, very different time...here we were, entering the workplace in the 1960s questioning--and often rejecting--many of the values we had been taught. We were the polite, perfectionist "good girls," who never showed our drive or our desires around men. Now we were becoming mad women, discovering and confronting our own ambitions, a quality praised in men but stigmatized--still--in women."
Author: Lynn Povich

19. "I think the general anxiety of the 1960s - '70s spawned our interest in the living dead. When people worry about the end of their world, they need a safe vessel for all their fears. Zombies provide that vessel because they're 'safe.'"
Author: Max Brooks

20. "Two best friends traveled from the Burdekin in North Queensland sometime in the 1960s and walked into the Union and fell in love with Grace. Tom finch was the smarter talker of the two and won first round, marrying her before his name came up in the lottery sending him to Vietnam on a tour of duty. He never returned. The heartbroken, patient one, Bill Mackee, grieved a best friend and married the love of his life, adopting the twins when they were four years old."
Author: Melina Marchetta

21. "I remember coming to this college in the 1960s as a new legislator when a road divided the campus - and it was not fully paved at that - and no wall defined the campus from the highway."
Author: Michael N. Castle

22. "The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that's true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: "Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O' Germany." Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are "frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen." Pop-Tarts are a "flat Cookie." No: "Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER notto mention a queer inch." No: "A Pop-Tart is a flat condom." Once last fall the whole page was replaced with "NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!"
Author: Nicholson Baker

23. "I think what I and most other sociologists of religion wrote in the 1960s about secularization was a mistake. Our underlying argument was that secularization and modernity go hand in hand. With more modernization comes more secularization."
Author: Peter L. Berger

24. "As a purely intellectual matter, nothing was suddenly discovered in the 1960s that contradicted the biblical witness on fornication, adultery, and homosexuality, or that established that Jesus hadn't really meant what he said about the indissolubility of marriage. . . . The difference was that in 1970 many more people wanted to believe these arguments because of the new sexual possibilities associated with the birth control pill."
Author: Ross Douthat

25. "John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university."
Author: Russell Banks

26. "But such people (Moderate Conservatives) aren't liberal. What they are is corporate. Their habits and opinions owe far more to the standards of courtesy and taste that prevail within the white-collar world than they do to Franklin Roosevelt and the United Mine Workers. We live in a time, after all, when hard-nosed bosses compose awestruck disquisitions on the nature of 'change,' punk rockers dispense leadership secrets, shallow profundities about authenticity sell luxury cars, tech billionaires build rock'n'roll musuems, management theorists ponder the nature of coolness, and a former lyricist fro the Grateful Dead hail the dawn of New Economy capitalism from the heights of Davos. Coversvatives may not understand why, but business culture had melded with counterculture for reasons having a great deal to do with business culture's usual priority - profit."
Author: Thomas Frank

27. "The dreams of the 1960s began to disappear in the 1970s. The economy collapsed, and so did the optimism of the Metabolists."
Author: Toyo Ito

28. "To pursue a so-called Third Way is foolish. We had our experience with this in the 1960s when we looked for a socialism with a human face. It did not work, and we must be explicit that we are not aiming for a more efficient version of a system that has failed."
Author: Vaclav Klaus

The 1960s Counterculture Quotes Pictures