Quotes About Counterculture

I have always felt that the rise of what became known as alternative comedy was born out of the loins of the alternative theatre movement.

Decisi di diventare un beatnik a tutti gli affetti[...]. Fumai tutta la marijuana che mi passava tra le mani, lessi Kerouac, ascoltai Bob Dylan e Roland Kirk e andai a vedere film francesi che non capivo.

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, and a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers... and also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of Budweiser, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. Not that we needed all that for the trip, but once you get locked into a serious drug collection, the tendency is to push it as far as you can.

We had incense and rock'n'roll posters, and we sold records and rolling papers. People could just, like, hang out. We had a cool vibe going.

Janis Joplin is singing with Big Brother in the Panhandle and almost everybody is high and it is a pretty nice Sunday afternoon.

Ça aime les auteurs déjantés, les artistes maudits et les putes dégénérées... Ça apprécie la décadence classée par ordre alphabétique.

A similar cycle has recurred throughout church history. Christians present an attractive counterculture until they become the dominant culture. Then they divert from their mission, join the power structure, and in the process turn society against them. Rejected, they retreat into a minority subculture, only to start the cycle all over again.

Lou's such an old punk he was around when the Ramones were junkie hustlers first and musicians second, when punk meant something other than a mass-marketing concept designed to help the bridge-and-tunnel crowd feel cool.

Dev's out to pierce the pierced, tattoo the tattooed, and have his way with the messy punk boys who came to our shows not knowing they'll end up wanting to mess around with the guy challenging How big is your cocker spaniel? into the mic.

I am an old punk.

We didn't have a positive song until we wrote 'Now I Wanna Sniff Some Glue!

When I was little I wanted to be like Kathleen Hanna or Courtney Love or be attached to the X-girls and hang out in downtown culture.

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

The delicate task that faces our civilization today is not to reform the secular, rationalist orthodoxy, which has passed beyond the point of redemption. Rather, it is to breathe new life into the older, now largely comatose, religious orthodoxies—while resisting the counterculture as best we can, adapting to it and reshaping it where we cannot simply resist.

Both the counterculture and its younger twin, postmodernism, then, are a rebellion against culture and art seen as autonomous, secular human activities. It is now felt, quite correctly, that these activities have been emptied of all spiritual substance even while continuing to claim a quasi-sacred mission.

The granddaddy of all countercultures, of course, was early Christianity itself. And in a polemic written in the 2nd century by the Greek philosopher Celsus, we have a marvelous document of the bewilderment and incomprehension with which Greco-Roman rationalists of the early Christian era viewed this counterculture.

as if I'd said I wanted to sell cheese sandwiches outside Grateful Dead concerts...

I remember going to the East Village for the first time as a fifteen-year-old and going to Tompkins Square Park. That really seemed like a pretty edgy thing to do.

I think the 'counterculture' believes that there are ways to manage being the world's most powerful country that involve creation of consensus - ruling by virtuous example rather than by force of arms.

When the punk thing came along and I heard my friends saying, I hate these people with the pins in their ears. I said, Thank God, something got their attention.

Punk's influence on music, movies, art, design and fashion is no longer in doubt. It is used as the measurement for what is cool.

We're a beat generation.

The word "emergence" seemed to crop up frequently. And most of all, there was this incredible energy and camaraderie in the air-a sense of barriers crumbling, a sense of new ideas let loose, a sense of spontaneous, unpredictable, open-ended freedom. In an odd, intellectual sort of way, the artificial life workshop felt like a throwback, like something right out of the Vietnam-era counterculture. And, of course, in an odd, intellectual sort of way, it was.