Do you sometimes wonder what it was like to be part of the infamous Summer of Love? The hippie movement developed into an impactful counterculture in the 1960s and took a stand for peace during the Vietnam War. If you want to learn more about how it felt to live life as a hippie, have a look at our collection of inspirational hippie quotes. P.S.: You may also enjoy our hand-picked selection of peace quotes.
The hippie movement advocated for peace and vehemently opposed nuclear weapons as well as war in general. It put a great emphasis on the importance of loving each other and being kind to another. As such, the hippie counterculture was able to change the public’s opinion about war in general and the American military involvement in Vietnam in particular.
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”
Jimi Hendrix
While the movement impacted American culture like no other group had ever before, it also introduced many negative changes, especially in America. In fact, the sixties counterculture brought an influx of drug usage, deadly overdoses/addictions, promiscuity along with teenage pregnancies, and dangerous spiritual beliefs.
These hippie quotes show you how life was like in the 1960s counterculture
Drugs were not only a part of the hippie movement but were instead heavily promoted by them. The characteristic lack of work ethic and the prevailing nihilism found among many hippies left many of them in poverty centuries later. In short, while the sixties counterculture brought positive change especially in regards to the Vietnam War, it proved to be disastrous on a wide range of other areas of civil life.
108 Hippie Quotes about Love, Peace, and the Counterculture’s Dangers
If you want to find out what the prevailing mindset during the hippie movement was, read on. The following quotes will show you what the hippies believed in and how they rallied for peace.
Enjoy this collection of hippie quotes
1.
“If someone thinks that peace and love are just a cliche that must have been left behind in the 60s, that’s a problem. Peace and love are eternal.“
John Lennon
2.
“When the hippie era ended and the hangover began, as idealism gives way to disillusionment, the hair of the marchers and street-dancers kept getting longer, and soon it began to tangle. Free love deteriorated into loveless promiscuity, our great electric Kool-Aid acid test churned out an entire generation of burnt-out old relics, and the hair, once a symbol of freedom, became symbolic of the new face of prison, a lawlessness which taken to its logical extreme would imprison all of society as our growing criminal element took to the streets.“
Tommy Walker
3.
“If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years.“
Bertrand Russell
4.
“Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.“
Joseph Campbell
5.
“As with most revolutions, the counterculture’s call for total freedom quickly turned into a demand for total control.“
Roger Kimball
6.
“Tragically misinformed, some Christian believers at first looked upon hippies as promising prospects through whom the Church could present the claims of Jesus Christ. Clergymen mistakenly proclaimed that hippies were searching for truth and meaning and needed only to be guided. Wasn’t their talk about love? Weren’t they seeking an opportunity to share the love of God with others?“
Bob Larson
7.
“You cannot step a foot into the literature about the 1960s without being told how ‘creative’, ‘idealistic’, and ‘loving’ it was, especially in comparison to the 1950s. I fact, the counterculture of the Sixties represented the triumph of what the art critic Harold Rosenberg famously called the ‘herd of the independent minds’. Its so-called creativity consisted in continually recirculating a small number of radical cliches; its idealism was little more than irresponsible utopianism; and its crusading for ‘love’ was largely a blind for hedonistic self-indulgence.“
Roger Kimball
8.
“If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there would be peace.“
John Lennon
9.
“They called themselves flower children and advocated free love, yet all too often what they experienced was not so much love as deep disappointment and burned-out minds.“
Gloria Gaither
10.
“All I can say is, it’s a good thing we didn’t win the revolution. We would’ve ended up with people like Abie Hoffman and Eldridge Cleaver at the helm; we would’ve been in big trouble. Big trouble. It would’ve been such a Stalinist purge… All those people that were the top names in those movements back then were all egotistical, it turned out, every single one of them.“
R. Crumb
11.
“The hippies claimed to have found meaning for existence through conscious expanding drugs. And although they sang of love in chants and groans, they knew nothing of love’s commitment and concern and duty towards one’s neighbor. They ignored the responsibility of love and dwelt upon their quest for uninhibited physical gratification.“
Bob Larson
12.
“The romance that has surrounded the Beat generation since the mid-Sixties has acted as a kind of sentimental glaze, obscuring its fundamentally nihilistic impulse under a heap of bogus rhetoric about liberation, spontaneity, and ‘startling oases of creativity.'”
Roger Kimball
13.
“You may say I’m a dreamer, but I’m not the only one. I hope someday you’ll join us. And the world will live as one.“
John Lennon
14.
“You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.”
Max Ehrmann
15.
“All we are saying is give peace a chance.“
John Lennon
16.
“Darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.“
Martin Luther King Jr.“
17.
“The Beats were not Promethean iconoclasts. They were drug-abusing sexual predators and infantilized narcissists whose shamelessness helped dupe a confused and gullible public into believing that their utterances were works of genius. They remain moral simpletons, whose destructive influence helped fuel the cultural catastrophe with which we are now living.“
Roger Kimball
18.
“An eye for an eye will only make the whole world blind.“
Mahatma Gandhi
19.
“You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.“
Robert A. Heinlein
20.
“In the sixties, the Commune emerged as a riposte to the nuclear family. This was an autonomic re-creation of not only preindustrial, but pre-agrarian life; it was the Return to Nature, but the Commune, like the colleges from which the idea reemerged, only functioned if Daddy was paying the bills, for the rejection of property can work only in subvention or in slavery.“
David Mamet
21.
“The importance of liking yourself is a notion that fell heavily out of favor during the Coptic, anti-ego frenzy of the Acid Era – but nobody guessed back then that the experiment might churn up this kind of hangover: a whole subculture of frightened illiterates with no faith in anything.“
Hunter S. Thompson
22.
“All things old become new again. In my youth, the athletes had crew cuts and the hippies had long hair. Now the athletes have long hair and the hippies are bald.“
Harley King
23.
“Love is that condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.“
Robert A. Heinlein
24.
“To an extraordinary extent, we in the West continue to inhabit a moral and cultural universe shaped by the hedonistic imperatives and radical ideals of the Sixties. Culturally, morally the world we inhabit is increasingly a trash world.“
Roger Kimball
25.
“The day the power of love overrules the love of power, the world will know peace.“
Mahatma Gandhi
26.
“When we heard about the hippies, the barely more than boys and girls who decided to try something different … we laughed at them. We condemned them, our children, for seeking a different future. We hated them for their flowers, for their love, and for their unmistakable rejection of every hideous, mistaken compromise that we had made throughout our hollow, money-bitten, frightened, adult lives“
June Jordan
27.
“The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.”
Vivienne Westwood
28.
“Do not look for happiness outside yourself. The awakened seek happiness inside.“
Peter Deunov
29.
“The hippie era was a wonderful time because we still believed we could make the world a better place.“
Lemmy Kilmister
30.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed individuals can change the world, indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.“
Margaret Meade
31.
“Their common denominator of humanism could not be reconciled with the Biblical view of man’s depravity after the Fall and his need for salvation. Too late, many ministers began to see that hippie non-conformity with, and rejection of, the world was hardly the same as that high spiritual quest advocated by the Apostle Paul.“
Bob Larson
32.
“With freedom, books, flowers, and the moon, who could not be happy.“
Oscar Wilde
33.
“She’d believed in the promises of the ’60s, after all, even if she’d participated only indirectly. Hadn’t they told themselves they would not be like the generation of their parents, trapped in choices they’d made at twenty?“
Garth Risk Hallberg
34.
“Imagine no possessions, 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
35.
“I try to be really hippie about things. I’m uptight in all the ways that are really important, but the things my husband and family can benefit from my uptightness, I’m completely lacking.“
Amanda Peet
36.
“War is over, if you want it.“
John Lennon
37.
“I had a confused early hippie phase, which was like a cafeteria tray of sloppy, semi-Marxist thoughts, absorbed second-hand.“
P. J. O’Rourke
38.
“When you’ve seen beyond yourself, then you may find peace of mind is waiting there.“
Geroge Harrison
39.
“They wanted to have a good time, but they were like children playing in the street; they could see one after another of them being killed – run over, maimed, destroyed – but they continued to play anyhow. We really all were very happy for a while, sitting around not toiling but just bullshitting and playing, but it was for such a terrible brief time, and then the punishment was beyond belief.“
Philip K. Dick
40.
“Ignore that nightmare in the bathroom. Just another ugly refugee from the Love Generation, some doom-struck gimp who couldn’t handle the pressure. My attorney has never been able to accept the notion—often espoused by reformed drug abusers and especially popular among those on probation—that you can get a lot higher without drugs than with them. And neither have I, for that matter.“
Hunter S. Thompson
41.
“In a gentle way, you can shake the world.“
Mahatma Gandhi
42.
“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
43.
“If there was any “sin,” it was that these people wanted to keep on having a good time forever, and were punished for that“
Philip K. Dick
44.
“When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.“
Bob Dylan
45.
“Dad, how do soldiers killing each other solve the world’s problems?“
Bill Watterson
46.
“There’s a limit to my patience with anything that smacks of metaphysics. I squirm at the mention of “mind expansion” or “warm healing energy.” I don’t like drum circles, public nudity or strangers touching my feet.“
Koren Zailckas
47.
“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
48.
“The cultural situation in America today (and indeed in all Western societies) is determined by the cultural earthquake of the nineteen-sixties, the consequences of which are very much in evidence. What began as a counter-culture only some thirty years ago has achieved dominance in elite culture and, from the bastions of the latter (in the educational system, the media, the higher reaches of the law, and key positions within government bureaucracy), has penetrated both popular culture and the corporate world.“
Peter L. Berger
49.
“I hate being so nostalgic about the Sixties.“
David Bailey
50.
“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
51.
“Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights. Get up, stand up, don’t give up the fight.“
Bob Marley
52.
“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.“
Abbie Hoffman
53.
“The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically, because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.“
Charles Bukowski
54.
“People will do anything, no matter how absurd, in order to avoid facing their own souls. One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.“
Carl Jung
55.
“Your mind is like a parachute, it doesn’t work unless it’s open.“
Jordan Maxwell
56.
“For a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. The shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. To someone who doesn’t understand growth, it would look like complete destruction.“
Cynthia Occelli
57.
“It isn’t by getting out of the world that we become enlightened, but by getting into the world… by getting so tuned in that we can ride the waves of our existence and never get tossed because we become the waves.“
Ken Kesey
58.
“The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn’t the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.“
John Lennon
59.
“Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.“
Abbie Hoffman
60.
“We were women in transition, raised in one era and coming of age in another, very different time… here we were, entering the workplace in the 1960s questioning – and often rejecting – many of the values we had been taught. ”
Lynn Povich
61.
“Post-structuralism is among other things a kind of theoretical hangover from the failed uprising of ‘68, a way of keeping the revolution warm at the level of language, blending the euphoric libertarianism of that moment with the stoical melancholia of its aftermath.“
Terry Eagleton
62.
“Intellectually, this new culture is legitimated by a number of loosely connected ideologies – leftover Marxism, feminism and other sexual identity doctrines, racial and ethnic separatism, various brands of therapeutic gospels and of environmentalism. An underlying theme is an antagonism toward Western culture in general and American culture in particular.“
Peter L. Berger
63.
“So much changed in the sixties, the war, the rights of women, civil rights, the vote, protest against the war. On and on. I was getting my Ph.D. in Chicago and you were in college but that time was upheaval with a purpose. Now we’ve drawn back into our shells, wondering what we have done and what do we believe? And is there any purpose to our lives?“
Susan Richards Shreve
64.
“Accept yourself as you are. And that is the most difficult thing in the world because it goes against your training, education, your culture. From the very beginning, you have been told how you should be; Nobody has ever told you that you are good as you are.“
Osho
65.
“That was the era of ripped jeans and dirty T-shirts when the kind of people who are impressed by material signs of success were not the people you wanted to know.“
Edmund White
66.
“Like the Arthurian years at Camelot, the Sixties constituted a breakthrough, a fleeting moment of glory, a time when a significant little chunk of humanity briefly realized its moral potential and flirted with its neurological destiny, a collective spiritual awakening that flared brilliantly until the barbaric and mediocre impulses of the species drew tight once more the curtains of darkness.“
Tom Robbins
67.
“I like old hippies so much more than old conservatives.“
Oliver Markus Malloy
68.
“The hippies wanted peace and love. We wanted Ferraris, blondes and switchblades.“
Alice Cooper
69.
“I wanna say hello to all the ex-hippies tonight. I’ve never been a hippie myself but I’m an honorary hippie.“
Bob Dylan
70.
“Though it’s frequently portrayed as this crazy, unbridled festival of rain-soaked, stoned hippies dancing in the mud, Woodstock was obviously much more than that – or we wouldn’t still be talking about it in 2009. People of all ages and colors came together in the fields of Max Yasgur’s farm.“
Richie Havens
71.
“The starry-eyed idealists of today have submerged their critical faculties beneath a tidal wave of slop marketed by those old hippies who now sell a user-friendly dilution of their original enlightenment.“
Peter J. Carroll
72.
“They looked at me, in my hippie garb, with horror and disgust, the Decline of Western Civilisation suddenly plopped in their midst.“
Paul Monette
73.
“The 1960s: A lot of people remember hating President Lyndon Baines Johnson and loving Janis Joplin and Jim Morrison, depending on the point of view.“
Richard Brautigan
74.
“I’m just an old hippie. You know, peace and love.“
Sherman Hemsley
75.
“I believe everyone is on a spiritual path—some people know it, some don’t. The ones that know it call themselves religious, spiritual, or Soul Searchers.“
Emma Mildon
76.
“We were self-taught in the sixties to award ourselves merit for membership in a superior group – irrespective of our group’s accomplishments. We continue to do so, irrespective of accomplishments, individual or communal, having told each other we were special.“
David Mamet
77.
“To plant a garden is to believe in tomorrow.“
Audrey Hepburn
78.
“Love takes off masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.“
James Arthur Baldwin
79.
“Never pretend to a love which you do not actually feel, for love is not ours to command.“
Alan Watts
80.
“Children are rarely taught critical thinking anymore, and society has become so antirational that basic reason and evidence are the new counterculture: thought is the new punk.“
Stefan Molyneux
81.
“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.“
Buckminster Fuller
82.
“Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable. This mystical flirtation with the idea of “sin” – this sense that it was possible to go “too far”, and that many people were doing it – this was very much with us in Los Angeles in 1968 and 1969. A demented and seductive vortical tension was building in the community. The jitters were setting in.“
Joan Didion
83.
“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
84.
“To be beautiful means to be yourself. You don’t need to be accepted by others. You need to accept yourself.“
Thich Nhat Hanh
85.
“I’m a little bit of a hippie at heart, so I always wear things that are comfortable and flowing.“
Carly Rae Jepsen
86.
“We learned that all one need do is refrain from trusting anybody over thirty; that all people are alike, and to judge their behavior was “judgmental”; that property is theft. As we did not investigate these assertions or their implications, we could not act upon them and felt no need to do so. For we were the culmination of history, superior to all those misguided who had come before, which is to say all humanity.“
David Mamet
87.
“I quickly discovered a surprising thing about the 1960s: the decade was not nearly as radical as we’ve been led to believe. In fact, the upheaval was really confined to a very narrow stratum of society. For the overwhelming majority of Americans, the 1960s was a conservative decade.“
Jonathan Leaf
88.
“The most important kind of freedom is to be what you really are. You trade in your reality for a role. You trade in your sense for an act. You give up your ability to feel, and in exchange, put on a mask. 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
89.
“I do my thing, and you do your thing. I am not in 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
90.
“We all sang the songs of peace.“
Melanie Safka
91.
“To get the hippie out of certain characters is probably the most difficult thing for me. I was not a hippie by choice but by birth.“
Melissa Leo
92.
“At the beginning of a decade when everything was beginning to seem possible, nothing seemed impossible.“
Margot Lee Shetterly
93.
“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
94.
“A right is not what someone gives you; it’s what no one can take away from you.“
Ramsey Clark
95.
“Live in the sunshine, swim in the sea, drink the wild air.”
Emerson
96.
“Work like you don’t need the money. Love like you’ve never been hurt. Dance like nobody’s watching.“
Satchel Paige
97.
“I mean, I come from a hippie mentality where I just think to know someone, you need to look into their eyes. Eyes are so important. Until they start melon-balling eyes out, I won’t be able to get to know someone another way.“
Drew Barrymore
98.
“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
99.
“1968 was the beginning of the hippie movement in fashion. That movement made fashion change completely. It was not necessary to be always dressed up. You could be dressed the way you wanted – it was absolute freedom.“
Sonia Rykiel
100.
“Don’t be afraid. There is no more to fear. Do not fear rejection. If you fear rejection by another you do not love the other, though you may profess it. You are only being anxious for his love of you. The free man does not seek the love of others, nor fear that his love will be rejected, for rejection – as is known from the night Christ was betrayed – does not destroy love, and it does not destroy the one who loves. Don’t be afraid, you are not alone.“
William Stringfellow
101.
“I had hippie parents, and I found it difficult to figure out how to rebel against them.“
Stewart Butterfield
102.
“I grew up in a very urban, bohemian family where everyone was a hippie or a pacifist. It was artistically and intellectually stimulating, but they were definitely not into outdoor sports or activities.“
Alexander Skarsgard
103.
“Never trust a hippie. That’s definitely my motto.“
Sam Taylor-Johnson
104.
“We tried to change Vietnam. Instead, Vietnam changed us.“
Tony Thomson
105.
“You find peace not by rearranging the circumstances of your life, but by realizing who you are at the deepest level.“
Eckhart Tolle
106.
“If you want to be free, be free. Cause there are a million things to be.“
Cat Stevens
107.
“If you smile at me I will understand because that is something everyone, everywhere does in the same language.“
Jefferson Airplane
108.
“Peace is always beautiful.“
Walt Whitman
I hope you enjoyed this collection of inspirational hippie quotes. Do you have a favorite quote that perfectly describes what the be movement was all about?
Stay victorious!
