Boy George Quotes

I took Punk to be the detonation of some slow-fused projectile buried deep in society's flank a decade earlier, and I took it to be, somehow, a sign.

We need punk now; we need it more than ever. We need rebellion by youth.

Punk rock is just another word for freedom.

If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge.

I was about 16 when punk started to happen... It felt like you had this naive idea that you could change things just by wearing something.

There's a big difference, as I'm sure you know, it's a slightly manneristic one, between people of the '60s and people of '68. Being a soixante-huitard - it's so nice to have a French word for it - is very different from just having happened to been a baby boomer in the '60s.

England was very frustrating in the Seventies for anyone who was trying to wake up. It was visible in punk, in clothes, and in the revival of mods and rockers fighting. All kinds of things were going on that just weren't individual to myself.

During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.

When punk really started to happen, it was a reaction against the disco craze of the time.

Punk was originally about creating new, important, energetic music that would hopefully threaten the status quo and the stupidity of the 1970s.

I think my father had a lot of anti-establishment in him. He came through the '60s.

My entire life, socially, was all around the Maggie era. That was the great challenge as a Sex Pistol was how to deal with Margaret Thatcher. I think we did rather good.

When I was a teenager in Milwaukee in the 1980s, life was pretty boring, and I found myself riveted by the sheer melodrama of everyday life of the 1960s.

It's really hard to imagine there ever being the kind of impact there was when punk rock happened in the late 70's. I wish there would be one big change like that again, but I don't know if that'll ever happen.

By the time I was 19, punk had occurred. It had a completely different cultural dynamic to it which rejected everything and started again from the year zero.

I don't think punk ever really dies, because punk rock attitude can never die.

The whole 'anniversary of punk' thing really compounded what I thought was wrong. I was so disillusioned. I remember thinking, 'I don't want anything to do with this.'

Woodstock didn't define a generation because everyone showed up or those who did were a perfectly representative sample. It defined a generation because, for a few days, it bottled its peculiar zeitgeist.

I think that, in the '60s, you had lots of things going on in the culture which tended to decrease attraction to marriage, attraction to religion, and which tended to increase attraction to crime.

In some ways, the '60s were a reaction to the '50s and the intensity of the Cold War.

That punk approach of 'We don't wanna get big' is really a bourgeois thing. It's not a tactic of people that actually have been successful at changing things.

When the mid-'70s came around, it looked like, 'Oh-oh, here come the punks.' But if you look closely at The Who and The Kinks, the anger and the frustration is there... There is, within me, just the same social discontent as I go through my career. But to be typecast as a singer of peace and love is fine.

It was a wonderful time to be young. The 1960s didn't end until about 1976. We all believed in Make Love Not War - we were idealistic innocents, darling, despite the drugs and sex. We were sweet lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works. None of us were famous, we were broke. We didn't think they'd be writing books about us in 30 years. We were just kids doing the right thing.

As I write, Johnny Rotten's first moments in "Anarchy in the U.K." - a rolling earthquake of a laugh, a buried shout, then hoary words somehow stripped of all claptrap and set down in the city streets - I AM AN ANTICHRIST - Remain as powerful as anything I know. Listening to the record today - listening to the way Johnny Rotten tears at his lines, and then hurls the pieces at the world; recalling the all-consuming smile he produced as he sang - my back stiffens; I pull away even as my scalp begins to sweat.