The Sixties Revolution
JOHN: The sixties saw a revolution among youth — not just concentrating in small pockets or classes, but a revolution in a whole way of thinking.
GEORGE: We were the generation who didn’t suffer from the war and we didn’t want to have to keep being told about Hitler. We were more bright-eyed and hopeful for the future, breaking out of the leftover Victorian mould of attitudes and poverty and hardship.
PAUL: There was a big period of freedom, which I always liken to God opening up the waves for Moses and then closing them down again.
JOHN: I think now the kids sing and want to hear about reality, whether that’s love or sex, or whatever it is.
PAUL: I suppose the fashion thing was a kind of eruption. We were erupting anyway, as The Beatles; and it’s very difficult to separate The Beatles’ eruption from the fashion or the cultural or the mind eruption. It was all happening at once, as a whirlpool.
RINGO: I feel The Beatles were doing what they wanted to do, and a lot of it was that youthfulness of trying to change ideas. I think it allowed people to do things they wouldn’t have done if we hadn’t been out there.
The Beatles, 2000, from the book The Beatles Anthology