Ellen Willis Quotes

My generation of the Sixties, with all our great ideals, destroyed liberalism, because of our excesses.

North American leftists just keep trying to relive the '60s, or to make the '60s happen again.

I always knew the Sixties wasn't a revolution. It really was just a bunch of university students with wealthy parents having fun.

I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.

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.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

Revolution For the Hell of It

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

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.

'Dreamers' was because I really wanted to go back after I heard so much nonsense about '68. I wanted to go back to what for me was '68, when young people thought that they could change the world.

Certainly there's a huge appeal to the '60s, because it was such a big turning point to everyone. It was the era of change, the boiling point. People rebelled against things - the hippies, the feminists, the protesters. All these things just built up and boiled over. I think people can relate to that today.

And if there's any hope for America, it lies in a revolution, and if there's any hope for a revolution in America, it lies in getting Elvis Presley to become Che Guevara.

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.

Disruption of the New Left

Revolution is like a love story, When you are in love, your become a much better person. And when you are in revolution, you become a much better person.

Ripping off is an act of revolutionary love.

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

I joined the party because I was a revolutionary, not because of any ideological nonsense.

Of course, the '60s was a study in decadence. Everything just got worse and worse, and at the end of the '60s, everything was so horrible that people were killing each other.

If you were around in the '60s, you already know that music and art and love are a critical part of the revolution. This is how we fight.

Anarchists prepare for social revolution and use every means- speech, writing, or deed, whichever is more to the point - to accelerate revolutionary development.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

And the young people in the 1960's identified with it immediately, because, I guess the young people had been having years of repression really. They felt that the, you know, after the war everything was very austere, particularly in Europe.