Pete Townshend Quotes

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

You can rebel against everything adults say. When I want to find out what the new music is, I find out what parents hate.

I am continually influenced by the feeling that music culture captured in the late 60s - for my generation, it was a time to rebel, against our parents, against everything.

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

Not long ago, a hat was a conformist accessory. Then the 1960s came along, and young people didn't want to wear hats.

All hippies around now just represent complete apathy.

Don't trust anyone over thirty.

It's never popular among young people to be part of the establishment.

The young always have the same problem – how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another.

The generation that comes next is always going to rebel against the generation that came before, and they're always going to be at odds with each other.

I was very head-strong, and this was the Vietnam War era - You did not listen to your parents or other authority figures. You didn't share their values. No one did in my circle. It was OK to rebel.

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

Rock'n'roll is not red carpets and MySpace friends, rock'n'roll is dangerous and should piss people off

When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different ... we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

You went to Woodstock and all that trash, your generation is fading fast.

I think for it to be hip to be idealistic is weird, you know? I mean, even all the best rebels to me, had some sense of hope in them.

During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

Young people get the foolish idea that what is new for them must be new for everybody else too. No matter how unconventional they get, they're just repeating what others before them have done.

Don't get caught up in fashion games. These kids probably think we're old, nark conformists or something, but really, they're just conforming in their own ways. They're conforming to nonconformity.

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.

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.

I got into journalism because I came of age in the '60s. It just seemed one way for me to get things done.

Nothing so dates a man as to decry the younger generation.