Top 95 Sixties Quotes

In the late sixties, when revolution and upheaval were everywhere, feminists were ridiculed for focusing on housework.

My father was a rags-to-riches businessman who came over in the Sixties with no money. On my mother‘s side, I am the grandson of a High Court judge and celebrated intelligence officer, so it’s quite an unusual combination.

Some of these sketches were done at the very beginning of the Pirates project, when I was trying to find a direction for myself. That was the early sixties… maybe 61 or 62.

The very paradigm of revolution, of right versus wrong, good versus bad, is a relic with no bearing on the present. Yet artists, exhibitions, and curators valorize the sixties. People who wrote about these artists 30 years ago still write about them in the same ways, often for the same magazines.

The Stones were more dangerous than other bands of the Sixties. It looked like they had more fun than the Beatles – like they stayed up later.

I love the Sixties and all those iconic women, Bridget Bardot and things like that, so I tend to lean towards those sorts of things.

It’s very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.

The late sixties and early seventies were kind of a breeding ground for exciting new sounds because easy listening and folk were kind of taking over the airwaves. I think it was a natural next step to take that blissful, easy-going sound and strangle the life out of it.

Back in those days, in the fifties and sixties, countries had balance of payment‘s deficits or surpluses, those were reflected much more than today in movements of reserves among countries.

I don’t regret what I did in the Sixties. I was young and took myself terribly seriously. In the Seventies, I spent too much time in inner-party factional disputes.

Well, I actually grew up in the sixties. I feel very lucky, actually, that that was my slice of time that I was dealt. Let’s remember that the real motivation in the sixties, and even in the fifties, was the Cold War.

Millions of people die every day. Everyone’s got to go sometime. I’ve came by this particular tumor honestly. If you smoke, which I did for many years very heavily with occasional interruption, and if you use alcohol, you make yourself a candidate for it in your sixties.

What happened in the late Fifties, early Sixties in French cinema was a fantastic revolution. I was in Italy, but completely in love with the nouvelle vague movement, and directors like Godard, Truffaut, Demy. ‘The Dreamers‘ was a total homage to cinema and that love for it.

I first came to Brazil in the Sixties. Then I started coming back every year since touring most of the country. I grew to love it, the people, the music. I thought this is where I belong. I’ve been living in Brazil for the past 23 years. I call it my stress-free country.

I’m a child of the sixties. I grew up with a president who was a crook, who put us into the most unpopular war in history, who had no communication with people under thirty. I had seen the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Panthers and the Diggers; I understood what they were about.

As young parents of three girls, living in California during the late Sixties and early Seventies, Meredith and I couldn’t help but be aware of the rising level of dialogue, debate, commentary, and proclamations about the place of women in society and about how to raise females in light of this raised consciousness.

Writing about where I was from and the people I knew was not something that would have occurred to me early on, because like so many Southerners of that period – the Sixties – I rejected those things when I went north.

The American ‘unum’ has been lost since the Sixties. If this continues, there will soon be no unifying American identity and vision to balance the ‘pluribus,’ and the days of the Republic will be numbered.

If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren’t really there.

Here we were supposedly changing the world for the better in the Sixties, but as we get 40 years further down the line, we realise that some of those changes such as the drugs probably weren’t all that great or sensible. It was all about social experiments.

As I grew older, I worked less as an actor and as a model, and I went back to what I had tried to do when I was young but wasn’t really available. I’m so glad now to be in my sixties and to be able to go back to school.

I think until Britain acknowledges just how much of a presence black people had here before the Sixties, then there are certain stories that are not going to be inclusive of what I have to offer.

For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.

Artists and musicians of the Sixties were definitely into clothes.

I really love a lot of early Sixties R&B, rock n’ roll, and I love performing songs that have that power and soulfulness.

But the whole point of the Sixties was that you had to take people as they were. If you came in with us you left your class, and colour, and religion behind, that was what the Sixties was all about.

How little those who are schoolgirls of today can realize what it was to be a schoolgirl in the fifties or the early sixties of the last century!

I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.

I don’t feel that I’ve had a life of abuse or that I am a victim in any way. My life is pretty typical of a lot of Americans of my generation who grew up in the sixties in families like mine that were sort of unconventional.

We got £25 a week in the early Sixties when we were first with Brian Epstein, when we played the clubs.

I think the sixties must have been quite a lot of fun.

I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we’re doing is not that. But it’s partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.

When I first started playing, I plunked away just like everyone else. During the Sixties I played in a blues band for a few years, and I liked it. It wasn’t until I was playing for a while that I made the decision to change my style from a percussive to more of a legato approach. I just wanted a different sound.

I liked back in the sixties where you’d turn on the radio and go ‘Oh that’s Hendrix, that’s Creedence Clearwater, that’s The Doors, there’s The Grass Roots, The Monkees, there’s Big Brother.’ You could just instantly hear it and tell. But in the eighties and nineties there’s no way you could do that.

I kind of just want to look like a cool French girl in the Sixties most of the time. Or TLC.

But, you know, the Stones were my opening act in the Sixties. I loved those British guys, the way they just stood there and shook their hair.

Generally, older people in their fifties, sixties, and seventies are running most countries and are CEOs of corporations. Which isn’t to say there aren’t entrepreneurs, but if the young were better in every respect, there’d be no reason for the old. Our life span reflects our particular life strategy.

By the time you’ve reached your sixties, you do know that one day you will die, and knowing that is at least the beginning of wisdom.

The Sixties were different in an isolated place. We got two television channels if the wind was blowing in the right direction. The radio stations went off at sundown. Then you picked up Chicago and heard the teenage music you really yearned for.

My dad is Chinese, and my mom is a white American, and they married only ten years after the United States Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to ban mixed marriages. Imagine that. Marriages between people of different races – now common and accepted – were illegal in many states up until the late Sixties.

Don’t underlook the Sixties; we started eating more vegetables, respecting women, and we shut down Vietnam. We did a lot of good stuff. But it shouldn’t shut you down from the moment.

I never went overseas until I left school and joined West Ham United Football Club at the beginning of the Sixties.

Most of my memories of the Sixties are ones of optimism, high spirits and confidence.

I went to the big Picasso retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, and I think I went to an Andy Warhol retrospective at the Tate in the sixties, too. My mother was very good at taking me to things like that. We lived in Reading, but we went on these cultural trips to London.

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, opposition to state terror and aggression and torture and so on was zero. That was a horrible time: the massive Kennedy terror operation against Cuba, the first attacks on Vietnam in 1962, the imposition of national security states in South America.

In the Sixties, fashion was about liberation. It was about setting women free; it wasn’t about being unable to walk.

I came through the Sixties so I was perfectly aware of drug-taking but I came from South Africa and we were brought up in quite an old-fashioned way. If I went to a rave or a party, I’d be behind the barbecue flipping the burgers. I wasn’t out there partying.

I know so many women in their fifties, sixties and seventies who delight in being on their own. It’s amazing. They don’t see any stigma attached to it. We don’t need a man to prove our identity anymore.

I grew up on all of the great spy movies and TV series of the Sixties – not just Bond, but Derek Flint and the Avengers and Modesty Blaise and the Man from UNCLE and on and on. Every time I sit down to work on Cinderella, I’m writing a love letter to all of those characters.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

I knew I was a winner back in the late sixties. I knew I was destined for great things. People will say that kind of thinking is totally immodest. I agree. Modesty is not a word that applies to me in any way – I hope it never will.

Here in L.A. the standard of beauty is kind of ridiculous. I want to be doing this when I’m in my fifties and sixties and this isn’t what I’m going to look like.

I’m singing these songs about death and stuff. I see somebody who’s, like, in their sixties or seventies at the show, and I’m like, ‘Yeah, sure. Fair enough.’

It’s the audiences that inspire me to keep going. I feel that we all grew up together. The majority now are the people who were raised on the music in the Sixties.

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.

When community action was put into federal law in the early sixties as part of the effort to combat poverty and social injustice, I supported it intellectually.

In Don Mills in the Sixties, nothing comes close to the humiliation of losing an argument. In our weird little creative circle, no one cares who has faster fists, but to lose an argument suggests inferior intelligence.

I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.

Bob Dylan was the source of pop music‘s unpredictability in the Sixties. Never as big a record-seller as commonly imagined, his importance was first aesthetic and social, and then as an influence.

The most wonderful time to be in the art world was in the sixties, because it wasn’t a business – there was no business of doing art.

As everyone else, I was a fan of Pink Floyd in the sixties.

The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.

I’d often use a Leslie cabinet on its own in the studio because everyone in the late Sixties and Seventies was experimenting with them. We’d stick anything through a Leslie because it made everything sound so good.

Growing up in the Sixties, whether it was the Batmobile or the costumes Porter Wagoner wore or the music that came from there, California was the home of what a friend of mine calls ‘custom culture.’ It seemed like the promised land.

People don’t remember that during the Fifties and Sixties there was a Cold War, and kids were getting under their desks during school because they thought they were going to get bombed. So it wasn’t really that ideal at all.

I was fortunate to spend the Sixties working for one of the greatest football minds this country has ever produced: Ron Greenwood.

You have to remember that I was an Australian girl of the Fifties and Sixties. For Australians at that time, it was imperative to get out of the country and discover the world.

Thankfully I’m not endlessly ambitious, but I have done some crazy ambitious things like buying an island off the west coast of Scotland in the late Sixties.

In the early sixties, we were strong, we were virulent.

As well as being a creative genius, Vidal Sassoon was a formative figure of the Sixties. Along with the Pill and the mini-skirt, his influence was truly liberating.

Where Charlie Christian left off, Papoose started a new thing; he was an innovator of the guitar. The things he did during his recording career with Fats Domino in the Fifties and Sixties until the day he died was as much a part of the music of New Orleans as anybody else has had to offer.

In the very early Seventies and the very late Sixties, nobody out here was originally from L.A.

In the Sixties, conglomerates were all the rage.

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that’s his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

I was initially recruited while I was in business school back in the late sixties by the National Security Agency, the nation‘s largest and least understood spy organization; but ultimately I worked for private corporations.

England was always very special. It was so important because the reason Benny and I started writing was the Beatles. During the Sixties, England was everything. To be number one in England was more important than being number one in America because England set the tone.

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.

I grew up in the Fifties and Sixties and remember how unpleasant all kinds of food could be then.

Growing up in the fifties and sixties, I can only remember knowing one child, ever, whose parents got a divorce, and hardly any whose mother ‘worked’ at anything besides raising her children.

I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.

Rock and roll’s relatively new, in the sense of the Fifties, Sixties, right? They invented the first sort of rock stars, and they took it to excess, and then the excess became bitter, tormented. Then it became okay to succeed.

How my film career happened, I don’t know. It was unplanned. I’d been in films and TV throughout the Sixties and early Seventies, but it was really ‘The Naked Civil Servant‘ in 1975 that put me on the radar.

The Fifties and Sixties were years of unreal optimism about weather forecasting. Newspapers and magazines were filled with hope for weather science, not just for prediction but for modification and control. Two technologies were maturing together: the digital computer and the space satellite.

I’m a child of the Sixties.

I think of the Sixties as being every man for himself.

The Sixties are most generously described as a time when people took part – when they stepped out of themselves and acted in public, as people who didn’t know what would happen next, but who were sure that acts of true risk and fear would produce something different from what they had been raised to take for granted.

People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around – the music and the ideas.

I prefer a three-piece suit myself. Very sixties rock and roll. But they’re not too quirky. Businessmen could wear them.

We were the only black family in an estate with 1,000 white families. Liverpool being quite racist in the Sixties, it was a bit grim growing up.

I’ve liked country music for forever. And Buck Owens is just one of many country guitarists I like. I think Buck’s Sixties records are really progressive.

A lot of the idealism of the Sixties was spot on, from the environmentalism to the war to the Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, you name it.

I am worried that young Japanese people are not very curious about the outside world – which is so different to the way we were in the Sixties and Seventies. All they want to listen to is Japanese pop. They haven‘t even heard of Radiohead!

In the early Sixties, having begun to describe the physiology of cells in the adult cat visual cortex, David Hubel and I decided to investigate how the highly specific response properties of cortical cells emerged during postnatal development.

The Beatles were great; we know that. But we were trying to do a new thing. Why do we need to recreate the Sixties?

In the late Fifties and early Sixties, I used to think that most of these fashion creators weren’t that great, and if the photograph was good, it was mostly thanks to the photographer.