Politics & Power Quote by John Mortimer

Mortimer’s line is a pin in the balloon of 1960s self-mythology, and he drives it in with the politest weapon imaginable: the comparison to a “congress of accountants.” It’s not that accountants are uniquely dull; it’s that they’re a shorthand for procedural sameness, people gathered under a professional identity that prizes order over charisma. By yoking “flower children” to that image, Mortimer flips the era’s branding. The counterculture sold itself as an explosion of individuality, color, and liberated desire. Mortimer hears a uniform: the same clothes, the same slogans, the same righteous certainty, just a different dress code.

The insult lands because it’s specific and social, not cosmic. “All” is doing heavy lifting: not some flower children, not many, but the whole tribe, reduced to a category. Then comes the sly cruelty of “as alike,” which suggests that the movement’s anti-establishment posture has hardened into a bureaucracy of its own. The subtext is generational impatience: a satirist’s suspicion that every supposed revolution eventually invents its own etiquette, its own moral pecking order, its own tedious meeting.

Context matters here. Mortimer, an English novelist and barrister with a practiced ear for public hypocrisy, is writing from the vantage point of someone who watched the decade’s idealism age into fashion and pose. The joke isn’t merely that hippies can be boring; it’s that conformism is portable, and rebellion can become just another well-attended conference.