63 Counterculture Quotes

Following is our list of counterculture quotations and slogans full of insightful wisdom and perspective about .

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Famous Counterculture Quotes

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

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

Go against the grain, refuse to conform, take the road less traveled instead of the well-beaten path. — Mandy Hale

I think being different, going against the grain of society is the greatest thing in the world. — Elijah Wood

Every generation revolts against its fathers and makes friends with its grandfathers. — Lewis Mumford

Undermine their pompous authority, reject their moral standards, make anarchy and disorder your trademarks. Cause as much chaos and disruption as possible but don't let them take you ALIVE. — Sid Vicious

Great thoughts are against all doctrines of conformity — Austin Osman Spare

A free society cherishes nonconformity. It knows from the non-conformist, from the eccentric, have come many of the great ideas. — Henry Steele Commager

It's kind of rebellious to be yourself. — Kate Moss

Pop culture used to be like LSD – different, eye-opening and reasonably dangerous. It’s now like crack – isolating, wasteful and with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. — Peter Saville

To be a hero you have to learn to be a deviant — because you're always going against the conformity of the group. — Philip Zimbardo

Punk became a circus didn't it? Everybody got it wrong. The message was supposed to be: Don't follow us, do what you want! — John Lydon

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. — Quentin Crisp

To rebel or revolt against the status quo is in the very nature of an artist. — Uta Hagen

Joining a sub-culture, any sub-culture, for whatever reason, is as I see it never a legitimate self-expression. It is always a result of sheep mentality; a wish to belong somewhere. — Varg Vikernes

Subculture Quotes

In any culture, subculture, or family in which belief is valued above thought, and self-surrender is valued above self-expression, and conformity is valued above integrity, those who preserve their self-esteem are likely to be heroic exceptions. — Nathaniel Branden

Baseball is this intense subculture that actually doesn't speak very much for the larger culture. — Michael Lewis

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture. - Jonathan Lethem

I try not to become too regular an addict of any one subculture. — Jonathan Lethem

The goths are beautiful, a vast depth of subcultural, aesthetic and poetic ideas, and we would identify with that as we did back in 1979. But not the post modern distortion...the costume without the brain. — Peter Murphy

I feel that Christian music is a subculture directed towards the Christians. It's not really being exposed to non-Christians and it's not really created for non-Christians, so non-Christians almost never hear any of this music. — Larry Norman

No, I'm not a comic book guy. I'm pretty fascinated with the subculture though and I do think that the world of comic books is such a natural transition into film. — Donal Logue

I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large. — Kenzaburo Oe

There's a lot about New York that is unique, and there's always a culture and a subculture going on everywhere. — Phil Ramone

We're Jews, my family, and Jews break down into two distinct subcultures: book Jews and money Jews. We were money Jews. — Ira Glass

Every culture, or subculture, is defined by a set of common values, that is, generally agreed upon preferences. Without a core of common values a culture cannot exist, and we classify society into cultures and subcultures precisely because it is possible to identify groups who have common values. — Kenneth E. Boulding

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More 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

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

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

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

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

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

'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

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

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

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

Any mature, spiritually sensitive view of marriage must be built on the foundation of mature love rather than romanticism. But this immediately casts us into a countercultural pursuit. — Gary L. Thomas

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

Drag wasn't always counterculture. — Joni Mitchell

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

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

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

I sense that striving for wholeness is, increasingly, a countercultural goal, as fragmented people make for better consumers. — Kathleen Norris

It’s not cool. I think being a wealthy member of the establishment is the antithesis of cool. Being a countercultural revolutionary is cool. So to the extent that you’ve made a billion dollars, you’ve probably become uncool. — Sean Parker

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

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

I hope I'm beginning a new cycle of energy and creativity. If so, it'll really be my third career. The first was as a straight comic in the Sixties. The second was as a counterculture performer in the Seventies. The third will be...well, that's for others to judge. — George Carlin

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

More generally, I made an effort to leave out things that weren't relevant to the main narrative themes of the book, namely that there were two sides to Steve Jobs: the romantic, poetic, countercultural rebel on one side, and the serious businessperson on the other. — Walter Isaacson

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

One of the fantastic things about Silicon Valley is that it's both the birthplace of technology and it was one of the birthplaces of the counterculture. The Internet and the personal computer were going to be like the communes, where we would all be networked together, and we would be able to achieve this state of global consciousness. — Franklin Foer

My father was very much a child of the counterculture movement and was drawn to the idea of alleviating poverty in the developing world, helping farmers diversify their crops and stuff like that. — Lydia Polgreen

In Pakistan, many of the young people read novels because in the novels, not just my novels but the novels of many other Pakistani writers, they encounter ideas, notions, ways of thinking about the world, thinking about their society that are different. And fiction functions in a countercultural way as it does in America and certainly as it did in the, you know, '60s. — Mohsin Hamid

I think the church needs to be much more countercultural than that and invite people into slowing down, into a "Be-still-and-know-that-I-am-God" mindset. — Parker J. Palmer

For my family and Howard's partner, who is like family, for 10 years we were in a state of shock. It takes time to appreciate fully what was going on then. That's connected because post-9/11 New York is so completely different from the way it was and the counterculture movement going on before then was so remarkable; I think people are appreciating it a lot more now. — Aaron Brookner

The church works best not as a power center, rather as a countercultural community - in the world but not of it - that shows others how to live the most fulfilled and meaningful life on earth. In modern society that means rejecting the false gods of independence, success, and pleasure and replacing them with love for God and neighbor. — Philip Yancey

Punk is no longer a subculture or a counterculture in any way. It's totally just a small reflecting mirror for the same things that go on in larger culture. — Geoff Rickly

Scripture is so counter culture. Christ was counter culture. It's not like we're supposed to be weird or anything, but as we grow closer to Christ, we won't care about the things of the world as much. As a believer, you're just going to be countercultural. That's the way its always been and it will always continue to be that way. That's why it's important for us as believers to encourage other believers that it's okay to be that way. — Alan Powell

Every band I’ve worked with also wants to be countercultural in the sense that they want to feel that they’ve gone somewhere that nobody else has been. — Brian Eno

There were two practical reasons we moved to Venice. One was that there was an artists movement and a countercultural movement. Lots of people we might want to hire lived in the area. We also wanted to buy in a lower rent area that looked like it was going to be gentrified so that we could eventually sell the studio for more money. — Roger Corman

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. — Sayings

... 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

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