Top 140 Punk Rock Quotes

I came up in the punk rock scene of Seattle.

Portland is where all the fringe groups went to escape. Where the outliers brought that DIY, punk rock attitude and made the city their own.

I came up playing in both punk rock bands and hip-hop bands, and I found a more universal way of reaching people, especially with music that has a message to it.

Punk rock is very rebellious, of course, but it also means thinking for yourself.

When I started, I was 18 and really into punk rock and just wanted the action. Over the years, I’ve gravitated towards the travel and experience around surfing and trying to relay that feeling. Going forward, I’m interested in story-driven and personality-driven themes.

I’ve not been an admirer of contemporary music since punk rock went off the boil in 1977, but once a year I’ll listen to ‘Spiral Scratch’ by the Buzzcocks, or ‘Hippy Hippy Shake’ by the Swinging Blue Jeans. Otherwise, I can put up with Chopin or shakuhachi flute in the background.

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

How movies are financed, it’s a world market now… I feel like, you know, the independent film way of working is something that was in my bones. It’s like being a part of a punk band, but no one’s singing punk rock anymore. Only a few bands are able to play, and Woody Allen is one of them.

For us, punk rock and even hardcore music was something we did because we didn’t fit in in high school. We had nowhere to go, so we went to shows.

To me, punk rock is the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It’s freedom.

I was into punk rock my whole life. I never listened to the Eagles. I never listened to things that were getting Grammys. So getting a Grammy nomination wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t meaningful.

To be involved in the subculture of punk rock puts you in a minority.

Even though we’re not the most punk rock band, the way we’ve done things is pretty punk rock. Just kinda say it with a big middle finger to the record labels and do it ourselves.

They wouldn’t play my records on American radio because I had spiky hair. They said, ‘Punk rock doesn’t sell advertising, it won’t make any money.’

When you break it all down, my punk rock is my dad’s blues. It’s music from the underground, and it’s real, and it’s written for the downtrodden in uncertain times.

I listened to classic rock and roll, and punk rock. ‘Goon Squad’ provides a pretty accurate playlist of my teenage years, though it leaves out ‘The Who,’ which was my absolute favorite band.

‘Waking the Fallen’ truly encompasses everything that Avenged Sevenfold was at that time. It was us being fearless, us showing our roots in heavy metal, punk, rock n’ roll, and not being afraid to try everything under the sun when it comes to writing music.

My perfect day would start with a kiss from my daughter. I would drive her to school listening to our favourite punk rock music on loud in the car.

As a New Yorker you can’t help but be proud of the fact that so much music and culture started here. Punk rock, jazz, hip-hop and house music started here, George Gershwin debuted ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ here; the Velvet Underground are from New York.

I started playing guitar at, like, 12 or 13 and just rock bands mostly. I had a punk rock band and hard core bands and all that.

For some young people, their first experience ever hearing punk rock music was playing the Green Bay Packers on ‘Madden’.

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

In between 15 and 20 – probably at around 17 – my interests switched from hard rock to punk rock. And then by 20 they were circling out of punk rock back into Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, the stuff that I didn’t get to when I was younger.

My perfect day would start with a kiss from my daughter. I would drive her to school listening to our favourite punk rock music on loud in the car.

I suppose when I was growing up, it was all about fitting into a box or fitting into a category. You know, looking like I listened to hip-hop, or looking like I listened to grime. You’d see someone and go, ‘Oh, look at that person. He’s wearing that or that; he listens to punk rock.’

The older I get, the more of an anarchist I become, and I don’t mean in a punk rock way.

I’ve always been spiritual but I’ve never had a proper context, and it took me awhile to find the proper context. It’s hard to realize you can have any kind of relationship with God you want… and so I now have a punk rock relationship with God.

Hip-hop and R&B is mostly what I listen to. I don’t have a connection with punk rock – I just never had that experience.

Punk is musical freedom. It’s saying, doing and playing what you want. In Webster’s terms, ‘nirvana’ means freedom from pain, suffering and the external world, and that’s pretty close to my definition of Punk Rock.

There’s also some element of coming of age during the Reagan administration, which everybody has painted as some glorious time in America, but I remember as being a very, very dark time. There was apocalypse in the air; the punk rock movement made sense.

Punk rock and skateboarding took the ‘school’ out of living your life, and I related to learning as I went, doing a lot of different things that I liked, when I liked. Consequently, I’m mediocre at all of the above, but still stoked on being a lifetime student of music, skating, painting, writing, etc.

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.

I feel like I’m a rock artist. I don’t feel like I’m a pop artist. And I’m alt rock. I’m indie rock. I’m punk rock. Because it comes from the pots and pans. It’s a lot of me, but I’ve got multiple personalities.

I was a suburban kid who fancied myself somehow intellectual. I was into punk rock but I couldn’t get into the subcultural signifiers of dyed hair, safety pins and torn denim. Being a punk seemed like a new set of rules that I wasn’t interested in having to follow.

What’s really cool about ‘This is Me’ is that our friends loved the song. Older punk rock fans don’t know ‘The Greatest Showman,’ haven’t seen the movie. And they hear that song and they’re like, ‘This just sounds like an awesome New Found Glory song. This is a really good song.’

I was always a punk rock skate kid from a very young age.

I play really bad punk rock guitar.

I remember being really young – being 13 or 14 – when I first was really excited about punk rock as an idea, and I was like, ‘Don’t ever not be punk. Don’t ever not be punk.’ Telling that to myself, I guess it was like self-defense against the scary world around me.

I heard Skip James, and it pierced me. It felt like punk rock to me, real and raw. It was just one guitar, so simple yet so much expression. I wanted to feel and express like that, to take the shortest path to get to an emotion.

I was living in upstate New York, in Kingston – small town, no comedy scene except for my friends and I doing these DIY shows and whatnot. And we put together this thing called the ‘Altercation Punk Rock Comedy Tour.’

The thing about punk is that there are purists. Once you start going outside of that, they don’t think what you’re doing is punk rock.

I was listening to punk rock in the ’70s as a young kid, but all by myself; I never met anyone that listened to that kind of music. Just by chance, I was in detention, and one of the guys in the class was Van Conner… I started talking to him and found out that we listened to some of the same music.

I was in punk rock bands, heavy metal bands, world music bands, jazz groups, any type of music that would take me. I just love music.

I was living in upstate New York, in Kingston – small town, no comedy scene except for my friends and I doing these DIY shows and whatnot. And we put together this thing called the ‘Altercation Punk Rock Comedy Tour.’

I was pretty much into punk rock and that’s all I cared about. I was into Green Day and the Ramones. I wanted to get a guitar so I could play punk songs because this kid taught me power chords at summer camp.

As a kid I was super into all kinds of pop. It wasn’t until I became a teenager that I moved more into alternative music and punk rock.

I think that clearly it has an influence, to be coming of age during the punk rock era, to come from a difficult and sporadically violent background, to have been in and out of such chaos, I think it actually helps. But I don’t know for sure.

The problem is we moved to LA… The only way to be punk rock in L.A. is to be a Republican.

There was a moment when Prince did rock & roll with a sponge-y seductive sound. I think that’s what was in our head for ‘Get On Your Boots.’ But actually, the song is much more punk rock.

I played in Velvet Revolver, which is a raw, bombastic blues band with a punk rock edge to it. It’s like everything is based around the blues, no matter what the groove is.

Style has always been very important to us. We grew up in the ’70s. Music was glam rock, punk rock and a very stylish movement.

I love rap, and I love the angst of hardcore music and punk rock.

I was really into punk rock but also into musical theater.

Style has always been very important to us. We grew up in the ’70s. Music was glam rock, punk rock and a very stylish movement.