Sixties Quotes

“If you'll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn't experience 'the sixties' until the seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the sixties were still experiencing the fifties--or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.”

“I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.”

“You may say, But wasn't this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.”

“Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realised its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.”

“That attitude toward women as objects may have worked for the late Sixties, but it doesn't do so now.”

“I worked for MI6 in the Sixties, during the great witch-hunts, when the shared paranoia of the Cold War gripped the services.”

“If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.”

“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.”

“When you reach your sixties you have to decide whether you're going to be a sot or an ascetic. In other words if you want to go on working after you're sixty some degree of asceticism is inevitable.”