Hippies believe the world could be a better place. Beatniks believe things aren’t going to get better and say the hell with it, stay stoned and have a good time. — Janis Joplin
The so-called Beat Generation was a whole bunch of people, of all different nationalities, who came to the conclusion that society sucked. — John Clellon Holmes
It is not my fault that certain so-called bohemian elements have found in my writings something to hang their peculiar beatnik theories on. — Jack Kerouac
I got treated very badly in Texas. They don't treat beatniks too good in Texas. Port Arthur people thought I was a beatnik, though they'd never seen one and neither had I. — Janis Joplin
Woe to those who spit on the beat generation, the wind will blow it back. — Bill Vaughan
The poet, the artist, the sleuth, whoever sharpens our perception tends to antisocial; rarely 'well adjusted,' he cannot go along with currents and trends. — Marshall McLuhan
We have seen the best minds of our generation destroyed by boredom at poetry readings. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Night and gin and music-the right setting for peeling off the thin clinging layers of bullshit and finding one's way down closer to the essential self. — John D. MacDonald
I was not a collective person or a bohemian; I was an elitist. — Elia Kazan
I be more hipper than a hippopotamus
Get off in your head like a neurologist — E-40
I was somewhat out of place among my classmates; I could not be as bohemian as they were. — Erno Rubik
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked. — Allen Ginsberg
People who go out and try to be a rebel at night,
Try to make up for the fact that they settled in life. — Immortal Technique
He is outside of everything, and alien everywhere. He is an aesthetic solitary. His beautiful, light imagination is the wing that on the autumn evening just brushes the dusky window. — Henry James
Short Beatnik Quotes
Standing on a street corner waiting for no one is power. — Gregory Corso
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved. — Jack Kerouac
Rap is poetry to music, like beatniks without beards and bongos. — David Lee Roth
Because the only people for me are the mad ones. — Jack Kerouac
I'm not a beatnik. I'm a Catholic. — Jack Kerouac
My style of performance poetry came from the beatniks, Allen Ginsberg. — Patti Smith
Beatnik Image Quotes
Beat Generation Quotes
John Clellon Holmes... and I were sitting around trying to think up the meaning of the Lost Generation and the subsequent existentialism and I said 'You know John, this is really a beat generation'; and he leapt up and said, 'That's it, that's right!' — Jack Kerouac
Kerouac opened a million coffee bars and sold a million pairs of Levis to both sexes. Woodstock rises from his pages. — William S. Burroughs
This is all very nice, because the ideas that Jack and the Beat generation stood for are needed today more than ever. But I'm not so interested in nostalgia. I'm interested in the future. — Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Suppose we suddenly wake up and see that what we thought to be this and that, ain't this and that at all? — Jack Kerouac
Kerouac was the cowboy that inspired the whole Beat Generation, and highlighted and put the spotlight on all of these minds that didn't really know what they were doing at the time, but accomplished something much bigger than what they ever foresaw. — Garrett Hedlund
I'm doing research for a large comic book on the Beat Generation guys - Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and those guys — Harvey Pekar
The beat generation is a coffeehouse full of people expectantly looking at their watches waiting for the beat generation to come on. — Mort Sahl
I look at my kids as the Harry Potter Generation. There's a sense of justice about that, in beating Voldemort. It's a classic tale of good versus evil. To have a role model like Harry Potter that says you can defeat evil, but still be a complicated human being. That gives me a lot of hope. — Mike Dirnt
The beat generation (coined in Playboy) — Jack Kerouac
It has to be acknowledged that in capitalist society, with its herds of hippies, originality has become a sort of fringe benefit, a mere convention, accepted obsolescence, the Beatnik model being turned in for the Hippie model, as though strangely obedient to capitalist laws of marketing. — Mary McCarthy
It took us a long time to find out that we had been lied to by our parents' generation. The moralities that were followed during our parents' generation were basically arbitrary. This caused a rift between the two generations, which was brought on by the beatniks — Peter Fonda
From Dickens's cockneys to Salinger's phonies, from Kerouac's beatniks to Cheech and Chong's freaks, and on to hip hop's homies, dialect has always been used as a way for generations to distinguish themselves. — Christopher Moore
The only thing I really wanted to be was a beatnik, and look what happened: I ended up being in a band. — Debbie Harry
I went one afternoon to the church of my childhood and had a vision of what I must have really meant with "Beat"... the vision of the word Beat as being to mean beatific... People began to call themselves beatniks, beats, jazzniks, bopniks, bugniks and finally I was called the "avatar" of all this. — Jack Kerouac
Celebrated in the Bob Dylan ballad “Joey”, Crazy Joe Gallo was a charismatic beatnik gangster whose forays into Greenwich Village in the 1960s inspired his bloody revolution against the Mafia. — Tom Folsom
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
Growing up, I'd already decided I wanted to be a beatnik. A Bohemian poet, I thought. Or a musician. Maybe an artist. I'd dress in black turtlenecks and smoke Gitanes. I'd listen to cool jazz in clubs, getting up to read devastating truths from my notebook, leaning against the microphone, cigarette dangling from my hand. — Charles de Lint
We also have a lot of the same influences - we both read a lot of the beatniks. And yet what we actually do is almost exactly the opposite. His [ Hunter S. Thompson] political stuff is just wonderful, but basically nothing happens. — P. J. O'Rourke
The first time I met Prince he invented me to his birthday party in Minneapolis. It was a costume party and I came as a beatnik - a beret and a charcoal goatee. He was dressed like an executioner. I talked to him for awhile and he didn't know who I was, and when I told him he was real surprised. — Paul Reubens
Cliches and stereotypes such as "beatnik" or "hippie" have been invented for the antitechnologists, the antisystem people, and will continue to be. But one does not convert individuals into mass people with the simple coining of a mass term. — Robert M. Pirsig
Oh, God. The Sixties are coming back. Well I've got a 12-gauge double-barreled duck gun chambered for three-inch Magnum shells. And - speaking strictly for this retired hippie and former pinko beatnik - if the Sixties head my way, they won't get past the porch steps. They will be history. Which, for chrissakes, is what they're supposed to be. — P. J. O'Rourke
My dad was a big fan of comedy. He wanted to be a stand-up. He loved Lenny [Bruce]. He also loved Lord Buckley and jazz and stuff. He was a hipster. My parents were kind of beatnik-y, you know, for Salt Lake City. But my humor, I think, came from wanting to disarm people before they hit me. — Judd Apatow
I like [Count] Olaf's wardrobe, because the whole thing seems like it should be a period piece in many ways, and yet the date is non-specific. So I would wear cloaks and jackets, but also turtlenecks. I was a little beatnik, and kind of hipster in that way. — Neil Patrick Harris
I got interested in Zen when I was a teenage beatnik on the streets of San Francisco. And it was my interest in Zen, in part, that got me into the Marine Corps, because that was a ticket to Asia. So I spent a couple of years on Okinawa and began reading and thinking about how I wanted to go about conducting my life. — Sam Hamill
As I became very conscious and more aware of things I got very into the beatniks and that kind of stuff. They were very important to me for a few years. — Marc Maron
Naturally, grown-up citizens are concerned about the beatniks and delinquents. ... The question is why the grownups do not, more soberly, draw the same conclusions as the youth. Or, since no doubt many people are quite clear about the connection that the structure of society that has becoming increasingly dominant in our country is disastrous to the growth of excellence and manliness, why don't more people speak up and say so? — Paul Goodman
There's this whole post-modern, nuevo beatnik, retro-bohemian thing going on, you know what I mean? You walk into some coffee shops, and it feels like you're an ex-patriot in Paris in the 20s. You're like, 'Hey, isn't that a young Ernest Hemingway over there? Yeah, I think it is! Hey, let's go have a look and see what he's writing... It's a Gap application.' — Marc Maron
The avant-garde and the beatniks share in the function of entertaining without endangering the good conscience of the men of good will. — Herbert Marcuse
When LOVE played the still hipper Whisky A Go-Go, further west along Sunset, Arthur Lee claims they 'started the whole hippy thing' in tandem with an in-crowd of freaks led by aging beatnik sculptor Vito Paulekas. It was Vito, Carl Franzoni, Sue, Beatle Bob, Bryan Maclean and me...people would come to Ben Frank's to hang out with us after we played shows. — Barney Hoskyns
But yet, but yet, woe, woe unto those who think that the Beat Generation means crime, delinquency, immorality, amorality ... woe unto those who attack it on the grounds that they simply don't understand history and the yearning of human souls ... woe in fact unto those who make evil movies about the Beat Generation where innocent housewives are raped by beatniks! ... woe unto those who spit on the Beat Generation, the wind'll blow it back. — Jack Kerouac
In Conclusion
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