Counterculture Quotes

• My generation's apathy. I'm disgusted with it. I'm disgusted with my own apathy too, for being spineless and not always standing up against racism, sexism and all those other -isms the counterculture has been whining about for years.

  Kurt Cobain

  Courage, Honesty, Fear

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• The counterculture is always repackaged and made into a product. It's part of America.

  Jim Jarmusch

  America, Made, Products

  Source: www.jonathanrosenbaum.net

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• It's pretty clear now that what looked like it might have been some kind of counterculture is, in reality, just the plain old chaos of undifferentiated weirdness.

  Jerry Garcia

  Music, Reality, Counter Culture

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• ... there was purity and there was the dream, and the adventure, and there was the counterculture aspect. It was like shove society, shove the nine to five, shove the rules ... we're just going to follow our hearts, treat each other well, eat well, and enjoy the ocean. It was not for money and it wasn't for fame ... that's what we're gonna do ... purely because that's what our hearts want to do. That was amazing.

  Jim Banks

  Dream, Ocean, Heart

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• Our confused society badly needs a community of contrast, a counterculture of ordinary pilgrims who insist living a different way. Unlike popular culture, we will lavish attention on the least "deserving" in direct opposition to our celebrity culture's emphasis on success, wealth, and beauty.

  Philip Yancey

  Confused, Community, Ordinary

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• Except in the areas of civil rights and medical marijuana, the legacy of the sixties counterculture has been largely superficial. Still, though the light has dimmed and gone underground, something in me would like to think the sixties phenomenon was a dress rehearsal for a grander, wider leap in consciousness yet to come.

  Tom Robbins

  Marijuana, Thinking, Rights

  "The Syntax of Sorcery". Interview with Tony Vigorito, realitysandwich.com. June 6, 2012.

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• To me, the counterculture was always what I grew up with the hippies in the late '60s. But, however you define it, it's really the excesses of youth and it's something that everyone goes through to some extent. Or if they don't, they should do.

  Derek Ridgers

  Hippie, Excess, Youth

  Source: therumpus.net

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• When Nirvana hit it big, it was overwhelming because we were part of the counterculture. Nirvana didn't go to the mainstream - the mainstream came to Nirvana.

  Krist Novoselic

  Mainstream, Bigs, Overwhelming

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• If you have a counterculture band, you put a name on it, you call them beatniks, and you can sell something - books or bebop. Or you label them as hippies and you can sell tie-dyed T-shirts.

  Jim Jarmusch

  Book, Hippie, Names

  Source: www.jonathanrosenbaum.net

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• David Bowie emerged as a rock star in the late '60s. And as Ken Tucker wrote, "In the face of the hippy era's sincerity, intimacy and generosity, Bowie presented irony, distance and self-absorption. His song 'Changes' announced the arrival of a new counterculture," unquote.

  David Bowie

  Song, Stars, Distance

  Source: www.npr.org

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• I grew up counterculture. I'm essentially a hippie, and I'm essentially a folkie.

  Steve Earle

  Hippie, Counter Culture, Grew Up

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• I did LSD and peyote in the late Sixties, before I got into cocaine. That was concurrent with my change from a straight comic to the album and counterculture period, and those drugs served their purpose. They helped open me up.

  George Carlin

  Drug, Albums, Peyote

  Source: reprints.longform.org

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• Dark influences from the American past congregate among us still. If we are a democracy, what are we to make of the palpable elements of plutocracy, oligarchy, and mounting theocracy that rule our state? How do we address the self-inflicted catastrophes that devastated our natural environment? So large is our malaise that no single writer can encompass it. We have no Emerson or Whitman among us. An institutionalized counterculture condemns individuality as archaic and depreciates intellectual values, even in the universities. (The Anatomy of Influence)

  Harold Bloom

  Dark, Past, Counter Culture

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• I get most of my news from the Jon Stewart Daily Show.It's the most level commentary you can find.You have to laugh, because it's all so true.It's the closest thing to a counterculture.

  John Mayall

  Counter Culture, Laughing, News

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• With the help of pressure groups, government now has crossed over into the final frontier of bigotry, what writer and Catholic theologian Michael Novak calls 'Christophobia .' Traditional Christians and Jews are the new counterculture - aliens in a land their forefathers' beliefs and values established and built.

  Cal Thomas

  Christian, Religious, Government

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• The rise of the Net and the Web represents a victory for the counterculture and the subculture. The next generation, raised on the Net as their primary medium, won't even know what consensus reality is.

  R. U. Sirius

  Reality, Victory, Next

  R. U. Sirius, Andrei Codrescu (2000). “The revolution: quotations from revolution party chairman R.U. Sirius”

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• I love our country. My dad served in the army. I always grew up with a song sense of belonging as an American. But I was also in the counterculture and I was coming from a place of fearing the police. So I was anti-establishment, but also loving your country. It's kind of an ironic sort of upbringing.

  Mike Dirnt

  Country, Song, Dad

  Source: www.rollingstone.com

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• Drag wasn't always counterculture.

  Joni Mitchell

  Drag

  "It's a Joni Mitchell concert, sans Joni". Interview with Matt Diehl, articles.latimes.com. April 22, 2010.

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• Besides the drugs and counterculture, I started talking about myself, which is the first thing you do when you are a writer.

  George Carlin

  Talking, Drug, Firsts

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• Seeing Anonymous primarily as a cybersecurity threat is like analyzing the breadth of the antiwar movement and 1960s counterculture by focusing only on the Weathermen.

  Yochai Benkler

  Movement, Analyzing, Weathermen

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• At least since the first petals of the counterculture bloomed across Europe and the United States in the 1960s, it has been fashionable to affirm that all religions are beautiful and all are true...This is a lovely sentiment but it is dangerous, disrespectful, and untrue.

  Stephen Prothero

  Beautiful, Europe, Lovely

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• 'Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era,' the Whitney Museum's 40th-anniversary trip down counterculture memory lane, provides moments of buzzy fun, but it'll leave you only comfortably numb. For starters, it may be the whitest, straightest, most conservative show seen in a New York museum since psychedelia was new.

  Jerry Saltz

  Summer, Art, New York

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• There is a book called San Francisco Tape Music Centre:1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde and this book describes everything that you want to know or don't want to know about it, with a lot of documentation.

  Pauline Oliveros

  Book, San Francisco, Tape

  Source: artsmania.ca

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• I have not been part of an active counterculture movement, as it is not the approach that I have personally pursued to create a qualitatively beneficial and meaningful impact on society.

  Al Seckel

  Meaningful, Impact, Counter Culture

  "An Interesting Walk Through Counterculture" by Al Seckel, www.huffingtonpost.com. April 2, 2009.

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• I was certainly a child of the '60s, and I came out of that era, and as a young actor, I got cast as a lot of counterculture hippie types.

  Rob Reiner

  Children, Hippie, Actors

  Source: www.avclub.com

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