War & Peace Quote by Margot Kidder

Nostalgia is doing two jobs here: polishing the past and quietly admitting it was messier than the myth. Kidder stretches “the 1960s” to 1976, treating the decade less like a calendar unit than a mood that lingered past Woodstock into Watergate’s hangover. That elastic timeline is the tell. She’s not reporting history; she’s reclaiming a feeling of extended youth before the culture fully sobered up.

The line “Make Love, Not War” lands as both sincere credo and shorthand for a whole moral posture: intimacy as politics, personal liberation as an anti-establishment vote. But Kidder’s real move is the pivot: “idealistic innocents, despite the drugs and sex.” It’s a neat inversion of the usual moralistic narrative (that sex and drugs corrupt). She suggests the opposite: that experimentation wasn’t the end of innocence, it was part of it - a kind of wide-eyed belief that breaking taboos could break systems.

There’s also self-defense embedded in the charm. Kidder, an actress whose career rose in the ’70s, is speaking from inside an industry that commodified the era’s “freedom” while punishing the people who lived it, especially women. The phrase “wonderful time to be young” is affectionate, but it’s also an elegy for a moment when optimism felt like a collective project, before cynicism became the default cultural language. The subtext: we were earnest, even when we were reckless, and history later mocked the difference.