Boy George Quotes

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.

When the punk thing came along and I heard my friends saying, I hate these people with the pins in their ears. I said, Thank God, something got their attention.

Growing up, my mates and I would have rather been Sid Vicious or members of the Royal Family.

All punk rockers hate Christmas.

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.

I was the first person to have a punk rock hairstyle.

When I was 13, I kind of got into the punk scene. I realized it was easier to wear a pair of combat boots and jeans and a beat-up T-shirt. I think of it as a uniform.

In fact, punk rock means exemplary manners to your fellow human beings.

By the time I was 18, I had absorbed punk rock from America, Britain, and the West Coast. All of it was so dark and weird and different and cool and hot and sexy and rebellious. It was a fist-in-the-air kind of rebellion that I wasn't getting from the '70s mainstream.

At college my three main interests were - in descending order of importance - a steady supply of recreational drugs, a 2-S draft deferment, and overthrowing the Nixon administration.

In many ways, I have no idea what would have become of me if punk hadn't happened, because the '70s turned out to be so stale, and so boring, and so backward compared to what had come just before. We were too young to have fully experienced the '60s and the fervor of the anti-war movement.

In a way I almost feel like the election of Donald Trump has inspired Democrats and progressives and punk rockers in a way that hasn't been seen since Vietnam.

The whole idea of punk rock is that you're dressing yourself in a crazy leather jacket with safety pins and a Mohawk. The idea of being the rebel is a boring societal idea. It's such a type. And that's what I was, without knowing it.

Punks in their silly leather jackets are a cliché. I have never liked the term and have never discussed it. I just got on with it and got out of it when it became a competition.

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

I was originally like a punker, know what I mean, like the punks are today, I'd spit in a minute.

They are called 'Emos' now, and before that they were 'Goths.' They didn't have a name for it when I was one, but I was that black-wearing teenager and yes, I wore a little eyeliner.

I was a punk before it got its name. I had that hairstyle and purple lipstick.

I had begun to abandon bourgeois style of dress. The modern hippies are no pioneers at marking themselves out by unusual apparel …

I'm interested in Patti Smith and women who were iconic in a very hedonistic way.

I first got into music when I heard punk, and it was saying maybe it's OK if you don't live up to the expectations various authorities have for you.

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.

I was the only real punk rock kid in my school, with, like, the plaid pants and the Rancid t-shirt.

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

The thing I loved about my old punk band, it wasn't really about being vulnerable, it was about shouting and being fun and being aggressively political, which I thought was really cool and really fit that energy.