Leonard Shlain Quotes

I read the Life magazine articles about free love and free dope in California. At age 20 I drove to Los Angeles.

We came out in the midst of the hippie hangover. All this mellow music.

We were wild-eyed hippies from the late '60s. We still had the exuberance of the mind-expanding '60s - that Tolkienesque, Zeppelin, androgynous, wood nymph, forest fairy kind of innocence. It sounds stupid now, but we felt we were changing the world with music.

I was a typical teen growing up in the 1960s, when everybody was into gurus and meditation.

Describing Woodstock as the 'big bang,' I think that's a great way to describe it, because the important thing about it wasn't how many people were there or that it was a lot of truly wonderful music that got played.

Sometime between when the Summer of Love ended and the Summer of Sam began, America became a nation of cynics about love.

Over the years Woodstock got glorified and romanticised and became the event that symbolised Utopia. It's the last page of our collective memory of the age of innocence. Then things turned ugly and would never be the same again.

The Haight is just a place; the '60s was a spirit.

The whole 1960s thing was a ten-year running party, which was lovely. It started at the end of the 1950s and sort of faded a bit when it became muddled with flower power. It was marvelous.

Those Laurel Canyon days were great. I have a real fondness for that era, 'til about '68. Musically, it was wonderful, and there was this great innocence, an idyllic view of the world. After that, everything got a little... edgy.

Malibu was a wellspring of counterculture group think.

Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.

I hitched up to Haight-Ashbury in the Summer of Love, you know? And I was very much politically aligned with that whole mentality, the whole ideology of that generation, the music, the culture, the behavior.

In the wake of the San Francisco scene, ears were alive. It was a listening generation.

It was 1967, and the hippie thing was happening. I got into experimenting with drugs while I was in college in Michigan.

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.

The 1960s were about releasing ourselves from conventional society and freeing ourselves.

I feel very lucky that I was part of that whole scene in the '60s and '70s. I love looking at the photographs because everyone was young, and they were so gorgeous to look at.

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

At the time of Woodstock, I was just 13, but I used to see these exotic hippy creatures and I did look on with envy. How could you not? In an ideal world, I would have loved to have been a hippy - but I might have been a bit strait-laced. It was my fantasy.

I'm a child of the Sixties.

Woodstock was both a peaceful protest and a global celebration.

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

I grew up in a hippie commune so I have a real hippie part of me.

I went to all the Love-Ins. I took my kids. I enjoyed myself.