We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.

We stand today on the edge of a new frontier -- the frontier of the 1960s, a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats. The new frontier of which I speak is not a set of promises -- it is a set of challenges.

Though the Jazz Age continued it became less and less an affair of youth. The sequel was like a children's party taken over by the elders.

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.

Our civilization survives in the complacency of cowardly or malignant minds -- a sacrifice to the vanity of aging adolescents. In 1953, excess is always a comfort, and sometimes a career.

The real passion of the twentieth century is servitude.

The age demanded that we dance and jammed us into iron pants. And in the end the age was handed the sort of shit that it demanded.

The early twenties when we drank wood alcohol and every day in every way grew better and better, and there was a first abortive shortening of the skirts, and girls all looked alike in sweater dresses, and people you didn't want to know said ''Yes, we have no bananas,'' and it seemed only a question of a few years before the older people would step aside and let the world be run by those who saw things as they were -- and it all seems rosy and romantic to us who were young then, because we will never feel quite so intensely about our surroundings any more.

The horror of the Twentieth Century was the size of each new event, and the paucity of its reverberation.