1968: The Year that Rocked the World

It is not an overstatement to say that the destiny of the entire human race depends on what is going on in America today. This is a staggering reality to the rest of the world; they must feel like passengers in a supersonic jetliner who are forced to watch helplessly while a passel of drunks, hypes, freaks, and madmen fight for the controls and the pilot's seat. – Eldridge Cleaver, Soul on Ice, 1968

Children need fairy tales, but it is just as essential that they have parents who tell them about their own lives, so that they can establish a relationship to the past.

Jamming was our ally. It made people curious about what we were hiding.

There’s a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can’t take part, you can’t even tacitly take part, and you’ve got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you’ve got to make it stop. And you’ve got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you are free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

Don't you sense the enormity of your mistake – you invade a country without understanding its music. – Norman Mailer

A modern revolutionary group, explained Abbie Hoffman, headed for the television station, not the factory.

Societies have always been shaped more by the nature of the media by which men communicate than by the content of the communication. —MARSHALL MCLUHAN AND QUENTIN FIORE, The Medium Is the Massage, 1967

The generation that grew up after World War II was so completely different from the World War II generation and the ones before it that the struggle for common ground was constant.

There has never been a year like 1968, and it is unlikely that there will ever be one again.

Gen. de Gaulle is only concerned about history, and no jury can dictate the judgment of history." Georges Pompidou