We stand today on the edge of a new frontier—the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises—it is a set of challenges.
—John F. Kennedy (1917–63) American Head of State, Journalist
The Great Society is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents…. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community…. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
—Lyndon B. Johnson (1908–73) American Head of State, Political leader
Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.
—Joan Didion (1934–2021) American Essayist, Novelist, Memoirist
I confidently predict the collapse of capitalism and the beginning of history. Something will go wrong in the machinery that converts money into money, the banking system will collapse totally, and we will be left having to barter to stay alive. Those who can dig in their garden will have a better chance than the rest. I’ll be all right; I’ve got a few veg.
—Margaret Drabble (b.1939) English Novelist, Biographer, Critic, Short Story Writer
The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.
—Albert Camus (1913–60) Algerian-born French Philosopher, Dramatist, Essayist, Novelist, Author
The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.
—Norman Mailer (1923–2007) American Novelist Essayist
In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.
—Barbara Ehrenreich (1941–2022) American Social Critic, Essayist
The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the “American Way of Life” is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don’t dig their caveman mops? They couldn’t care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don’t like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.
—Eldridge Cleaver (1935–98) American Author, Activist
We can safely abandon the doctrine of the eighties, namely that the rich were not working because they had too little money, the poor because they had much.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist
To say “I accept” in an age like our own is to say that you accept concentration-camps, rubber truncheons, Hitler, Stalin, bombs, aeroplanes, tinned food, machine guns, putsches, purges, slogans, Bedaux belts, gas-masks, submarines, spies, provocateurs, press-censorship, secret prisons, aspirins, Hollywood films and political murder.
—George Orwell (1903–50) English Novelist, Journalist
Maybe in the 90s or possibly in the next century people will look upon the 80s as the age of masturbation, when it was taken to the limit; that might be all that’s going on right now in a big way.
—Bob Dylan (b.1941) American Singer-songwriter
I like to think of my behavior in the sixties as a “learning experience.” Then again, I like to think of anything stupid I’ve done as a “learning experience.” It makes me feel less stupid.
—P. J. O’Rourke (1947–2022) American Journalist, Political Satirist
All in all, I would not have missed this century for the world.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
I was lucky enough to see with my own eyes the recent stock-market crash, where they lost several million dollars, a rabble of dead money that went sliding off into the sea. Never as then, amid suicides, hysteria, and groups of fainting people, have I felt the sensation of real death, death without hope, death that is nothing but rottenness, for the spectacle was terrifying but devoid of greatness… I felt something like a divine urge to bombard that whole canyon of shadow, where ambulances collected suicides whose hands were full of rings.
—Federico Garcia Lorca (1898–1936) Spanish Poet
My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.
—Timothy Leary (1920–96) American Psychologist, Author
We were that generation called “silent,” but we were silent neither, as some thought, because we shared the period’s official optimism nor, as others thought, because we feared its official repression. We were silent because the exhilaration of social action seemed to many of us just one more way of escaping the personal, of masking for a while that dread of the meaningless which was man’s fate.
—Joan Didion (1934–2021) American Essayist, Novelist, Memoirist
The defiance of established authority, religious and secular, social and political, as a world-wide phenomenon may well one day be accounted the outstanding event of the last decade.
—Hannah Arendt (1906–75) German-American Philosopher, Political Theorist
The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.
—John Lennon (1940–80) British Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Activist
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around—the music and the ideas.
—Bob Dylan (b.1941) American Singer-songwriter
The early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn’t want to know said Yes, we have no bananas, and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were—and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.”
—Anonymous
The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) American Author, Journalist, Short Story Writer
The 1950s to me is darkness, hidden history, perversion behind most doors waiting to creep out. The 1950s to most people is kitsch and Mickey Mouse watches and all this intolerable stuff…
—James Ellroy (b.1948) American Crime Fiction Writer, Essayist
Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children’s party taken over by the elders.
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940) American Novelist
The last best hope of earth, two trillion dollars in debt, is spinning out of control, and all we can do is stare at a flickering cathode-ray tube as Ollie “answers” questions on TV while the press, resolutely irrelevant as ever, asks politicians if they have committed adultery. From V-J Day 1945 to this has been, my fellow countrymen, a perfect nightmare.
—Gore Vidal (1925–48) American Novelist, Essayist, Journalist, Playwright
It is in our interests to let the police and their employers go on believing that the Underground is a conspiracy, because it increases their paranoia and their inability to deal with what is really happening. As long as they look for ringleaders and documents they will miss their mark, which is that proportion of every personality which belongs in the Underground.
—Germaine Greer (b.1939) Australia Academic, Journalist, Scholar, Writer
Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds—a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.
—Albert Camus (1913–60) Algerian-born French Philosopher, Dramatist, Essayist, Novelist, Author
As the end of the century approaches, all our culture is like the culture of flies at the beginning of winter. Having lost their agility, dreamy and demented, they turn slowly about the window in the first icy mists of morning. They give themselves a last wash and brush-up, their oscillated eyes roll, and they fall down the curtains.
—Jean Baudrillard (1929–2007) French Sociologist, Philosopher
We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.
—John Lennon (1940–80) British Singer, Songwriter, Musician, Activist
By all but the pathologically romantic, it is now recognized that this is not the age of the small man.
—John Kenneth Galbraith (1908–2006) Canadian-Born American Economist