Philosophy
…see the whole thing is a world full of rucksack wanderers, Dharma Bums refusing to subscribe to the general demand that they consume production and therefore have to work for the privilege of consuming, all that crap they didn’t really want anyway such as refrigerators, TV sets, cars,…and general junk you finally always see a week later in the garbage anyway, all of them imprisoned in a system of work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume, I see a vision of a great rucksack revolution thousands or even millions of young Americans wandering around with rucksacks, going up to mountains to pray, making children laugh and old men glad, making young girls happy and old girls happier, all of ’em Zen Lunatics who go about writing poems that happen to appear in their heads for no reason and also by being kind and also by strange unexpected acts keep giving visions of eternal freedom to everybody and to all living creatures.
Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums, 1958 (Yes, that’s just part of one sentence!) |
Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages.
William S. Burroughs |
the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn, like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes “Awww!”
Jack Kerouac |
How does it feel to be on your own, with no direction home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone?
Bob Dylan
(Like A Rolling Stone) |
You’re either on the bus or off the bus.
Ken Kesey
(On The Bus) |
Be Here Now!
Ram Dass
(Be Here Now) |
You create your own reality.
Seth
Seth Speaks |
Imagine no possesions, I wonder if you can, No need for greed or hunger, A brotherhood of man. Imagine all the people Sharing all the world.
John Lennon
(Imagine) |
I’ve been smiling lately, dreaming about the world as one. And I believe it could be someday it’s going to come.
Cat Stevens
(Peace Train) |
And maybe it’s the time of year. Yes, and maybe it’s the time of man. And I don’t know who I am. But life is for learning.
Joni Mitchell/CS&N
(Woodstock) |
I’m just beginning to see… The trees are drawing me near, I’ve got to find out why.
The Moody Blues
(Tuesday Afternoon) |
We are stardust, we are golden, and we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden.
Joni Mitchell/CS&N
(Woodstock) |
Like a true Nature’s child, we were born, born to be wild
Steppenwolf
(Born to be Wild) |
Old hippies don’t die, they just lie low until the laughter stops and their time comes round again.
Joseph Gallivan |
Feed them on your dreams.
CS&N
(Teach Your Children) |
They’ve all gone to look for America.
Simon and Garfunkel
(America) |
If you’re going to San Francisco, be sure to wear a flower in your hair
Scott Mckenzie
(San Francisco) |
Go with the flow!
Ancient Hippy Saying |
When you’ve seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there.
George Harrison
(Within You Without You) |
If it feels good do it!
Unknown |
Don’t trust anybody over thirty!
Jack Weinberg |
Do your own thing.
Unknown |
The Medium is the Message.
Marshall McLuhan |
Black is beautiful
Unknown |
Tell it like it is.
Unknown |
Keep the Faith!
Unknown |
Hippy is an establishment label for a profound, invisible, underground, evolutionary process. For every visible hippy, barefoot, beflowered, beaded, there are a thousand invisible members of the turned-on underground. Persons whose lives are tuned in to their inner vision, who are dropping out of the TV comedy of American Life.
Timothy Leary
(The Politics of Ecstasy) |
Sock it to me?Richard Nixon on Laugh-In |
Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it’s time to pause and reflect.
Mark Twain |
I took the road less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.
Robert Frost |
Go confidently in the direction of your dreams
Live the life you’ve always imagined.
Henry David Thoreau |
Love
“Do you want me to tell you something really subversive? Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. That’s why people are so cynical about it. . . . It really is worth fighting for, being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.”
Erica Jong – How to Save Your Own Life |
C’mon people, now
smile on your brother,
ev’ry-body get together,
try to love one another right now.
Chet Powers/Youngbloods
(Get Together) |
Carry on, love is coming.
Love is coming to us all
CS&N
(Carry On) |
And if you can’t be with the one you love, honey
Love the one you’re with
CS&N
(Love the One You’re With) |
Made up my mind to make a new start. Going to California with an aching in my heart. Someone told me there’s a girl out there
With love in her eyes and flowers in her hair.
Led Zeppelin
(Goin’ to California) |
Love is all you need.
Beatles
(All You Need is Love) |
Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
Kahlil Gibran |
If you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with.
Steven Stills |
We’ve got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can’t
just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it’s going to get on
by itself. You’ve got to keep on watering it. You’ve got to really look after
it and nurture it”
John Lennon |
Make Love, Not War
Unknown |
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I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not tin this world to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this world to live up to mine. You are you, and I am I, and if by chance we find each other, it’s beautiful.
Frederick E. Perl |
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Freedom
“Our programme is cultural revolution thorugh a total assault on culture, which makes use of every tool, every energy and every media we can get our collective hands on… our culture, our art, our music, our books, our posters, our clothing, the way our hair grows long, the way we smoke dope and fuck and eat and sleep-it’s all one message-the message is freedom”
-John Sinclair (1969) |
If you want to be free, be free, because there’s a million things to be.
Cat Stevens
(If You Want to Sing Out) |
Got to get back to the land and set my soul free
Joni Mitchell/CS&N
(Woodstock) |
One thing I can tell you
is you’ve got to be FREE!
John Lennon,
(Come Together) |
Nobody living can ever stop me. As I go walking my freedom highway. Nobody living can make me turn back. This land was made for you and me.
Woody Guthrie
This Land Was Made For You and Me (1940) |
A time for love, a time for hate, a time for peace, I swear it’s not too late.
The Byrds
(Turn! Turn! Turn!) |
We can change the world, rearrange the world. It’s dying – if you believe in justice. It’s Dying – if you believe in freedom. It’s Dying – let a man live his own life. It’s Dying – rules and regulations, who needs them! Open up the door
Crosby, Stills & Nash (Chicago) |
How many years can a people exist before they’re allowed to be free?
Bob Dylan
(Blowin’ in the Wind) |
I’ve miles and miles of pretty files of your forefathers’ fruit. And now to suit our great computer, you’re magnetic ink!
…It riles them to believe that you perceive the web they weave, and keep on thinking free…
The Moody Blues
(In The Beginning) |
Cannot believe what I see. All I have wished for will be. All our race proud and free.
Donovan
(Wear Your Love Like Heaven) |
Your sons and your daughters are beyond your command.
Bob Dylan
(The Times they are a-changin’) |
Paranoia strikes deep
Into your life it will creep
It starts when you’re always afraid. You step out of line, the man come and take you away
Buffalo Springfield
(For What it’s Worth) |
Let’s live for today!
The Grass Roots
(Let’s Live for Today) |
Feelin’ groovy
Simon and Garfunkel |
There’s a feeling I get, when I look to the west, and my spirit is longing for leaving.
Led Zeppelin
(Led Zeppelin IV) |
Up against the wall, Motherfucker!
MC5 |
I like ideas about the breaking away or overthrowing of established order. I am interested in anything about revolt, disorder, chaos, especially activity that seems to have no meaning. It seems to me to be the road towards freedom – external freedom is a way to bring about internal freedom.
Jim Morrison |
A friend is someone who lets you have total freedom to be yourself.
Jim Morrison |
Expose yourself to your deepest fear; after that, fear has no power, and the fear of freedom shrinks and vanishes. You are free.
Jim Morrison |
The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. …You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask.
Jim Morrison |
Whoever controls the media, controls the mind.
Jim Morrison |
Those who desire to give up Freedom in order to gain Security, will not have, nor do they deserve, either one.
Thomas Jefferson |
Activism
“Hippies started the ecology movement. They combated racism. They liberated sexual stereotypes, encouraged change, individual pride, and self-confidence. They questioned robot materialism. In four years they managed to stop the Vietnam War. They got marijuana decriminalized in fourteen states during the Carter Administration.”
Timothy Leary (Chaos and Cyberculture) |
All we are saying is give peace a chance.
John Lennon
(Give Peace a Chance) |
They won’t give peace a chance, that’s just a dream some of us had
Joni Mitchell
(California) |
You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.
Bob Dylan
(Subterranean Homesick Blues) |
We all want to change the world.
Beatles
(Revolution) |
How many times must the cannonballs fly, before they’re forever banned?
…How many deaths will it takes till he knows that too many people have died?
Bob Dylan
(Blowin’ in the Wind) |
Look at mother nature on the run in the 1970’s
Neil Young
(After the Gold Rush) |
All the news of home you read, more about the war and of bloody changes
Joni Mitchell
(California) |
Soldiers are cutting us down!
Crosby, Stills & Nash
(Ohio) |
If the button is pushed, there’s no running away. There’ll be no one to save with the world in a grave.
P.F. Sloan/Barry McGuire
(The Eve of Destruction) |
So long, Mom
I’m off to drop the bomb
So don’t wait up for me
But while you swelter
Down there in your shelter
You can see me
On your TV
Tom Lehrer
So Long, Mom (A Song for World War III) |
A thousand people in the street Singing songs and carrying signs…
Buffalo Springfield
(For What it’s Worth) |
…we condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakeable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives.
June Jordan |
The battle outside ragin’ will soon shake your windows and rattle your walls.
Bob Dylan
(The Times they are a-changin’) |
Get up, stand up! Stand up for your right! Don’t give up the fight!
Bob Marley
(Get Up, Stand Up!) |
We won’t get fooled again!
Pete Townsend
(Won’t get fooled again!) |
Think of all the hate there is in Red China, then take a look around to Selma, Alabama.
Barry McGuire
(The Eve of Destruction) |
It ain’t me, it ain’t me
I ain’t no military son
Creedence Clearwater Revival
(Fortunate Son) |
Millions of mind guerrillas…
Raising the spirit of peace and love, not war.
John Lennon
(Mind Games) |
There’s battle lines being drawn. Nobody’s right if everybody’s wrong. Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind.
Buffalo Springfield
(For What it’s Worth) |
Somebody exploded an H-bomb today, but it wasn’t anybody I knew.
The Moody Blues
(Dear Diary) |
The people in power will not disappear voluntarily, giving flowers to the cops just isn’t going to work. This thinking is fostered by the establishment; they like nothing better than love and nonviolence. The only way I like to see cops given flowers is in a flower pot from a high window.
William S. Burroughs |
He who wants to fight begins the end of time… Turn the earth to sand and still commit no crime!
The Moody Blues
(One More Time to Live) |
Why do we never get an answer, when we’re knocking at the door?
With a thousand million questions, about hate and death and war. ‘Cause when we stop and look around us, there is nothing that we need. In a world of persecution, that is burning in its greed.
The Moody Blues
(Question) |
Until the philosophy that holds one race superior, and another, inferior, is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned, everywhere is war.
Haille Sellassie/Bob Marley
(War) |
Southern change gonna come at last! Now your crosses are burning fast,
Southern Man.
Neil Young
(Southern Man) |
Beatniks and politics, nothing is new.
Strawberry Alarm Clock (Incense and Peppermints) |
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.
The Who
(Won’t Get Fooled Again) |
I’m frightened for your children, that the life that we are living is in vain.
The Moody blues
(The Story in Your Eyes) |
It’s a fool who plays it cool by making this world a little colder.
Beatles
(Hey Jude) |
Don’t drink the water and don’t breathe the air!
Tom Lehrer
(Pollution) |
Off the Pigs!
Huey Newton |
Question Authority!
Unknown |
No nukes is good nukes!
Unknown |
Power to the People!
Unknown |
You’re old enough to kill, but not for votin’. You don’t believe in war, but what’s that gun you’re totin’?
P.F. Sloan/Barry McGuire
(The Eve of Destruction) |
Burn, baby, burn!
Stokeley Carmichael |
If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.
Eldridge Cleaver
(Soul on Ice) |
Hey, hey, LBJ, how many kids did you kill today?
Anti-war slogan |
The Whole World is Watching!
Chant on the streets of Chicago during the 1968 Democratic Convention, as the police were beating the demonstrators, passersby, and the media, who broadcast it all. |
Hell no, we won’t go!
Anti-war chant |
You must be the change you wish to see in the world.
Mahatma Ghandi |
The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.
Abbie Hoffman |
Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.
Margaret Mead |
There can’t be any large-scale revolution until there’s a personal revolution, on an individual level. It’s got to happen inside first.
Jim Morrison |
Don’t change Dick in the middle of a screw! Vote for Nixon in ’72!
Unknown |
Drugs
“His hair has the long jesuschrist look. He is wearing the costume clothes. But most of all, he now has a very tolerant and therefore withering attitude toward all those who are still struggling in the old activist political ways . . . while he, with the help of psychedelic chemicals, is exploring the infinite regions of human consciousness.”
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968). |
My advice to people today is as follows: If you take the game of life seriously, if you take your nervous system seriously, if you take your sense organs seriously, if you take the energy process seriously, you must turn on, tune in, and drop out.Timothy Leary
The Politics of Ecstacy
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He’ll fly his astral plane, takes you on a trip around the bay, brings you back the same day, Timothy Leary…
Moody Blues
(Legend of a Mind) |
But I would not feel so all alone, everybody must get stoned.
Bob Dylan
(Rainy Day Women nos. 12 & 35) |
One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small. And the ones that mother gives you don’t do anything at all. Go ask Alice, when she’s ten feet tall.
Jefferson Airplane
(White Rabbit) |
Purple Haze all in my brain, lately things don’t seem the same. Actin’ funny but I don’t know why. ‘Scuse me while I kiss the sky.
Jimi Hendrix
(Purple Haze) |
Remember what the doormouse said, Feed your head!
Jefferson Airplane
(White Rabbit) |
Drivin’ that train, high on cocaine.
The Grateful Dead
(Casey Jones) |
I get by with a little help from my friends, get high with a little help from my friends.
The Beatles
(With a Little Help From My Friends) |
Electrical banana is gonna be a sudden craze. Electrical banana is gonna be the very next phase. They call it Mellow Yellow…
Donovan
(Mellow Yellow) |
Businessmen they drink my wine, come and taste my herb.
Jimi Hendrix version
(All Along the Watchtower) |
What in the world ever became of sweet Jane? She lost her sparkle, you know she isn’t the same. Livin’ on reds, vitamin C, and cocaine
All a friend can say is, “Ain’t it a shame?”
The Grateful Dead
(Truckin’) |
I watched the needle take another man.
Neil Young
(The Needle and the Damage Done) |
Better living through chemistry.
Dow Chemical advertisement |
Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.
Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers |
Avoid all needle drugs. The only dope worth shooting is Richard Nixon.
-Abbie Hoffman |
If you can remember the ’60s, then you weren’t there.
Unknown |
Reality is a crutch for people who can’t handle drugs.
Unknown |
LSD melts in your mind, not in your hand.
Unknown |
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Jo Jo left his home
in Tucson, Arizona, for some California Grass.
The Beatles (Get Back)
(don’t need to anymore!) |
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Music
“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed
by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient
heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the
machinery of night,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high
sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of
cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities
contemplating jazz.”
Allen Ginsberg
Howl |
People today are still living off the table scraps of the sixties. They are still being passed around- the music and the ideas.
Bob Dylan (1992) |
We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first- rock and roll or Christianity.
John Lennon |
There was a band playing in my head, and I felt like getting high
Neil Young
(After the Gold Rush) |
Let the sound take you away…
Steppenwolf
(Magic Carpet Ride) |
We all sang the songs of peace
Melanie
(Lay Down) |
Do you believe in rock ‘n roll? Can music save your mortal soul?
Don McLean
(American Pie) |
We all got up to dance
Oh, but we never got the chance!
Don McLean
(American Pie) |
Down through all of eternity the crying of humanity, tis’ then when the hurdy gurdy man comes singing songs of love.
Donovan
(Hurdy Gurdy Man) |
Do you believe in magic?
Believe in the magic of a young girl’s soul? Believe in the magic of rock ‘n roll?
Believe in the magic that can set you free?
The Lovin’ Spoonful
(Do You Believe in Magic) |
The New York State Freeway’s closed, man. Far out!
Arlo Guthrie at Woodstock |
Good morning! What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for 400,000.
Wavy Gravy at Woodstock |
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