Woodstock Festival

"I'm not worried about the security particularly. If people have enough to do, there won't be trouble."

"The cream of the underground will be there. Everybody's coming from all over the country. There'll be drugs and psychedelics and music and riots."

"My parents knew there'd be drugs there, that it'll be a bit wild. They didn't want me to come. I know there'll be drugs everywhere and I wonder what it will all be like. I've never been away from home before. I wonder what will happen to all of us."

"Anybody who tries to comes here is crazy. Sullivan County is a great big parking lot."

"As far as I know the narcotics guys are not arresting anybody for grass. If we did there isn't enough space in Sullivan (county) or the next three (sic) "countries" to put them in."

"Stop Max's Hippie Music Festival. No 150,000 hippies here. Buy No Milk."

"Don't bother Max's cows. Let them moo in peace."

"Good morning! What we have in mind is breakfast in bed for four hundred thousand."

"It's about the quietest, most well-behaved 300,000 people in one place that can be imagined. There have been no fights or incidents of violence of any kind."

"If we had any inkling that there was going to be this kind of attendance, we certainly would not have gone ahead. … We've had a very averse situation here... Financially speaking, of course, the festival is a disaster."

"You aren't taking poison acid. The acid's not poison. It's just badly manufactured acid. You are not going to die. We have treated 300 cases and it's all just badly manufactured acid. So if you think you've taken poison, you haven't. But if you're worried, just take half a tablet."

"I hope David can hear it."

"We're vestiges of our former selves."

"The whole thing is a gas. I dig it all, the mud, the rain, the music, the hassles."

"I guess this was meant to happen, and everybody is still with us. We're going to go on all night with the music."

"Like wow, these people are really beautiful, the cops, the storekeepers, the army, everybody."

"Notwithstanding their personality, their dress and their ideas, they were and they are the most courteous, considerate and well-behaved group of kids I have ever been in contact with in my 24 years of police work."

"I think it was fantastic. I think the only way its been overdone was thinking it changed the world, politically and as far as the war went. It was only a part of things. It wasn’t it."

"We were ready to rock out and we waited and waited and finally it was our turn... ...there were a half million people asleep. These people were out. It was sort of like a painting of a Dante scene, just bodies from hell, all intertwined and asleep, covered with mud."

"And this is the moment I will never forget as long as I live: a quarter mile away in the darkness, on the other edge of this bowl, there was some guy flicking his Bic, and in the night I hear, 'Don't worry about it John. We're with you.' I played the rest of the show for that guy.""

"Men reached the moon in July 1969, and Woodstock began three weeks later. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this was when the hippies took over the country, and when the true cultural war over Progress was lost. Today's aged hippies no longer understand that there is a difference between the election of a black president and the creation of cheap solar energy; in their minds, the movement towards greater civil rights parallels general progress everywhere. Because of these ideological conflations and commitments, the 1960s Progressive Left cannot ask whether things actually might be getting worse."