Greil Marcus Quotes

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

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

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.

'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.

Every reform movement has a lunatic fringe.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

Turn on, Tune in, Drop out.

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.

I used to think we were going to win in the '60s. Nixon went out and I thought we won.

In 1962, the smallest things were upsetting to authority. It wasn't the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn't the Anti-war Movement. It was something else, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.

I certainly was one of the instigators in the 1960s of freedom of expression.

'Easy Rider' was never a motorcycle movie to me. A lot of it was about politically what was going on in the country.

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

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.

There's no single movement out there. It's not like in the '60s, when Revolver came out and that's just it for the next year.

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.

Disruption of the New Left

The 1960s was an era of big thoughts. And yet, amazingly, each of these thoughts could fit on a T-shirt.

To talk about the '60s almost brings tears to my eyes. What we did. What we all did. We changed the world.

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

Somewhere in the '60s, actors became wimps and basket-case psychotics.