Sixties Quotes

Here, we’ve compiled a list of the best Sixties Quotes from famous authors such as Gene Roddenberry, Kate Moss, John Major, Paul Merton, Khaled Hosseini. Let’s look at these pieces of wisdom. We definitely have something to learn from them!

1
If ‘Trek’ is a hit, we’d love to do a series of films – a regular event. Look at James Bond’s films. They’ve been around since the early sixties.
Gene Roddenberry
2
I love the Sixties with Julie Christie and Jane Birkin – those natural English beauties. That’s the look that is most me, when I wore the tight-to-the knee dresses. I don’t think I bleached my hair until I was 20. I like experimenting for big occasions, though. You’ve always got to do a bit of a number for the birthday!
Kate Moss
3
In housing in the fifties in Britain and the sixties, we pulled down the terraces – destroyed whole communities and replaced them with tower blocks and we built walkways that became rat-runs for muggers. That was the fashionable opinion. But it was wrong.
John Major
4
I was trying to organise my DVDs into a sort of chronological order, and I am afraid that it all trailed off after the Sixties.
Paul Merton
5
Kabul was very popular with the hippies in the Sixties and Seventies. It was very quiet and peaceful.
Khaled Hosseini
6
I was in college in the sixties when movies really got good. I’m a fan of Bergman and Hitchcock and Polanski and Antonioni. Those are my gods.
David Small
7
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.
Charles Frazier
8
In the very early Seventies and the very late Sixties, nobody out here was originally from L.A.
Joe Walsh
9
For those that don’t know, my sister was born with Down Syndrome, and she was institutionalized in the very early sixties. Me, being just a small boy and being shuffled around between my mother and grandparents, I never knew her.
Nikki Sixx
10
I think the sixties must have been quite a lot of fun.
Tama Janowitz
11
I look at couples in the street who are in their sixties and have been together for 40 years, and they’re my idols. That’s Ice and me for sure.
Coco Austin
12
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.
Robyn Davidson
13
I love the idea of the Swinging Sixties in London.
Debra Stephenson
14
Ellison was prominent on the lecture circuit even in the Black Aesthetic days of the Sixties when his defiantly pro-American and prickly-proud intellectual act met with some hostility.
Darryl Pinckney
15
A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldn’t have happened without the social changes.
Steve Winwood
16
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.
Michael Caine
17
As everyone else, I was a fan of Pink Floyd in the sixties.
Klaus Schulze
18
In the early sixties, we were strong, we were virulent.
John Connally
19
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
20
Being from Brazil, I missed out on a lot of American music, so I like to go back and check things out – music from the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. So much of that stuff was groundbreaking.
Max Cavalera
21
I’m a child of the sixties, I’m a man of the sixties. During that period of time this country was coming apart at the seams. We were in Southeast Asia. Good men were dying for America and for the Constitution.
Curt Flood
22
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.
Jerry Heller
23
In the future, people will blame the Eighties for all societal ills in the same way that people have previously blamed the Sixties. The various Thatcherite Big Bangs – monetarism, deregulation, libertarianism – have been working their way through the culture ever since.
Peter York
24
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.
Isabella Rossellini
25
I helped make the Sixties swing, and I’m very proud of that.
Cilla Black
26
It’s very hard to have lived through the Sixties and not be political.
Joe Dante
27
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.
Jack Bruce
28
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.
Torsten Wiesel
29
Artists and musicians of the Sixties were definitely into clothes.
Yoko Ono
30
In the sixties, everyone you knew became famous. My flatmate was Terence Stamp. My barber was Vidal Sassoon. David Hockney did the menu in a restaurant I went to. I didn’t know anyone unknown who didn’t become famous.
Michael Caine
31
On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin’s remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.
Ellen Willis
32
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.
Rose Byrne
33
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.
Noam Chomsky
34
I think a lot of people of my generation have a certain guilt that, from the Sixties onwards, we started taking package holidays abroad and neglected our own country.
Michael Portillo
35
Well I’m a very similar age to Prince Charles. I’m a year older than him. I was at university at the same time as him. I think in the sixties, like all the Royals, he really had very little impact on my life at all and he seemed, if anything a lot older in his attitudes.
Anthony Holden
36
I missed so much of the Swinging Sixties by working. From 1961 to 1969, I got up at 4.30 A.M., a car came for me at 5.30 A.M., and I was taken to our studio at Teddington or Elstree, and we filmed until I got home at 9.30 P.M., five days a week.
Patrick Macnee
37
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.
Dionne Warwick
38
I’m a classic emerald green Sixties Jaguar that nobody can own, but my husband is allowed to drive.
Tori Amos
39
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.
Cynthia Kenyon
40
In the sixties, you’re still thinking you could do something about this slow disintegration of the body.
Nick Nolte
41
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
David Foster Wallace
42
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.
Augusten Burroughs
43
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.
Kate Christensen
44
I always knew the Sixties wasn’t a revolution. It really was just a bunch of university students with wealthy parents having fun.
John Lydon
45
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.
William Klein
46
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.
Ronnie Spector
47
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.
Bjorn Ulvaeus
48
The Sixties was a time of breaking down class barriers, although I think class still exists today in some areas.
David Bailey
49
Music was so important to the culture when I was growing up in the Sixties and Seventies. We just expected that Bob Dylan was going to make a great record, and it was normal. It was like, ‘Okay, here’s another great record by Bob Dylan; here’s another great record by Led Zeppelin.’
John Mellencamp
50
People of my generation who became photographers in the late fifties, early sixties, there were no rewards in photography. There were no museum shows. Maybe MOMA would show something, or Chicago. There were no galleries. Nobody bought photographs.
Duane Michals
51
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.
Arne Glimcher
52
The Beatles were great; we know that. But we were trying to do a new thing. Why do we need to recreate the Sixties?
Ian Brown
53
In the Sixties, conglomerates were all the rage.
Jim Pattison
54
The freedom that women were supposed to have found in the Sixties largely boiled down to easy contraception and abortion; things to make life easier for men, in fact.
Julie Burchill
55
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!
Ryuichi Sakamoto
56
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.
Jon Landau
57
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.
Alex Lifeson
58
The Sixties are now considered a historical period, just like the Roman Empire.
Dave Barry
59
As a lad growing up in the Fifties and Sixties, I played both Gaelic football and soccer and loved them both.
Martin McGuinness
60
In the sixties when Paul was with the Beatles and I was with the Moody Blues, we shared the same bill and tried to blow each other off the stage.
Denny Laine
61
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.
Marc Davis
62
The nineteenth century, especially the second half of it, was a time of restatement in Ireland. After the famine, after the failed rebellions of the Forties and Sixties, the cultural and political desires for self-determination began to shape each other in a series of riffs on independence and identity.
Eavan Boland
63
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.
Dr. John
64
I prefer a three-piece suit myself. Very sixties rock and roll. But they’re not too quirky. Businessmen could wear them.
Scott Weiland
65
I designed the miniskirt that caused so much havoc in the Sixties – the miniskirt that was such fun but has travelled well to today.
Mary Quant
66
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.
Marianne Faithfull
67
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.
Peter Frampton
68
When men reach their sixties and retire, they go to pieces. Women go right on cooking.
Gail Sheehy
69
I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.
David Bailey
70
I was fortunate to spend the Sixties working for one of the greatest football minds this country has ever produced: Ron Greenwood.
Harry Redknapp
71
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.
Buzz Osborne
72
I’m basically as shy a person as I was when I once worked in an office in London in the late Sixties. I like my own company. I didn’t need a lot of friends.
Gilbert O’Sullivan
73
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.
Chris Roberson
74
For me, the lame part of the Sixties was the political part, the social part. The real part was the spiritual part.
Jerry Garcia
75
Sixties models knew nothing about skin care.
Marie Helvin
76
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.
Chuka Umunna
77
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.
Marjorie Liu
78
My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.
Camille Paglia
79
That attitude toward women as objects may have worked for the late Sixties, but it doesn’t do so now.
John Schlesinger
80
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.
Terry Pratchett
81
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.
David Oyelowo
82
I started to read James Baldwin very early on in my life. At a time, as a young adult in the Sixties, when there were not that many authors in whom I could recognize myself, he was an important guide and mentor to me, as he was to many others. He helped me understand who I was and decipher the world around me.
Raoul Peck
83
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.
Allan Holdsworth
84
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.
Os Guinness
85
I grew up in the sixties watching B.B. King and Tito Puente and Miles Davis and Coltrane, everybody, Marvin Gaye, Jimi. And at the same time, with my left eye I was watching Dolores Huerta, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Mother Teresa.
Carlos Santana
86
I am not made for lonely expeditions. In the sixties, I climbed during the day so I wouldn’t have to be alone. I finally learned to stay up for weeks in the high altitude all by my own without being afraid.
Reinhold Messner
87
End of the sixties, Keith Blazey interested me to work on GdAlO3, an antiferromagnet on which he had done optic experiments. This started a fruitful cooperation on magnetic phase diagrams, which eventually brought me into the field of critical phenomena.
Heinrich Rohrer
88
We got £25 a week in the early Sixties when we were first with Brian Epstein, when we played the clubs.
George Harrison
89
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
90
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.
Albert Hammond, Jr.
91
During the Sixties, the Americans thought I was the greatest thing in the history of cinema.
Michael Winner
92
Here’s the truth. Your teens and twenties are your Plan A. At 50, you’re assessing whether Plan B or Plan C or any of the other plans you hatched actually worked. Your sixties and seventies, they’re an improvisation.
Dick Van Dyke
93
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.
Wavy Gravy
94
In space-flight terms, six landings on the moon back in the Sixties and Seventies doesn’t mean much.
Jim Lovell
95
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!
Mary Augusta Ward
96
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.
Steve Winwood
97
In the Sixties, fashion was about liberation. It was about setting women free; it wasn’t about being unable to walk.
Veruschka von Lehndorff
98
I mean people have compared us to like the Grateful Dead and all these like psychedelic sixties bands.
Jon Fishman
99
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.
Bernardo Bertolucci
100
In the Led Zeppelin shows of the Sixties and Seventies, it was the same numbers every night, but they were constantly in a state of flux. If I played something good, really substantial, I’d stick it in again.
Jimmy Page
101
One of the things that fascinates me most about the toys of the Sixties and Seventies is that they were characters without stories, as such.
Chris Roberson
102
When you’re a young actor, there’s this pressure to rush. But I hope to be doing this into my sixties and seventies, so I’d prefer to take my time.
Felicity Jones
103
The American foreign policy trauma of the sixties and seventies was caused by applying valid principles to unsuitable conditions.
Henry Kissinger
104
If you can remember anything about the sixties, you weren’t really there.
Paul Kantner
105
Many things happened in the sixties, but the period is no more significant, better, or more ‘political’ than today. It’s time to turn the page.
Jerry Saltz
106
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.
Steven Van Zandt
107
I think of the Sixties as being every man for himself.
Penelope Tree
108
Although the civil-rights movement did a lot to change how black life was dramatized on the American stage in the fifties and sixties, white composers and lyricists often still rely on familiar tropes when it comes to representing black women in musicals.
Hilton Als
109
You’re always trying to do something that, on one hand, honors all those stories, that is still in some way the same character that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby were doing back in the sixties. But, at the same time, you want to be able to tell new stories and not just rehash what’s come before.
Jason Aaron
110
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.
Arnold Schwarzenegger
111
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
112
I kind of just want to look like a cool French girl in the Sixties most of the time. Or TLC.
Laura Harrier
113
I remember driving to North Carolina when I was a little girl in a snowstorm to get down to my mom’s family in the Carolinas. There were chains on the car – it was the late sixties – and we were just singing in the car. Christmas carols.
Tori Amos
114
Rap’s conscious response to the poverty and oppression of U.S. blacks is like some hideous parody of sixties black pride.
David Foster Wallace
115
When I think of my childhood, I see my mother, the complete sixties parent, decked in purple frappe silk caftans, the acidic smell of newly stripped pine mingling with incense.
Hamish Bowles
116
The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.
Brian Cox
117
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.
Michael Chabon
118
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.
Barney Frank
119
The sixties were characterized by a heady belief in instantaneous solutions.
Audre Lorde
120
In Windsor in the forties, and even up into the fifties and sixties, if you were black, you had to sit in the balcony of the theatres, and you couldn’t buy property in most places.
Wayne Grady