Greil Marcus

"While its well known that as one gets older, one tends to find changes in the world at large unsettling, confusing, fucking irritating, a rebuke to ones very existence, its generally not a good idea to make a career out of saying so. (emphasis in the original)"

"...as I write, Johnny Rottens 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."

"Complete freedom meant — no one knew. It was most readily defined in the negative: not this gap between the heaven promised in the new advertisements and the everyday satisfactions I can buy. Not the sense that when I leave my work for my family, and bring my family to a Sunday in the park, my leisure feels like work. Not this mad conviction that I’m a stranger in my own home town, that at work I feel like a machine, that in the park I feel like an advertisement, that at home I feel like a tourist."

"The moments of perfect pleasure in Johnsons songs, and the beauty of those songs, remind one that it is not the simple presence of evil that is unbearable; what is unbearable is the impossibility of reconciling the facts of evil with the beauty of the world."

"Every youth movement presents itself as a loan to the future, and tries to call in its lien in advance, but when there is no future all loans are canceled."