People From Chicago

"People like to come up to me and tell me that I've got nice ink. Except these tattoos aren't just decorations. They are declarations. Every tattoo I have tells its own story about who I am. Drug-free. Honor. And a war against the system. See I'm not some punk kid looking for the next thrill. I'm a highly disciplined athlete, craving to compete with the very best. My obsession is competition and my addiction is wrestling. My name, is C...M... Punk."

"Don't let these tattoos fool you. I'm straight edge. I'm a man of great discipline; I don't drink, I don't smoke, I don't do drugs... my addiction is wrestling - my obsession is competition. Discipline. My name is C...M...Punk."

"You're a whore!"

"You dumb bitch, I'm not holding a microphone!"

"I'm going to pull my car around, Joe's is going to throw him out the front door and I'm gonna run the son of a bitch over! If he kicks at two, I'll drive that car right into the ocean."

"I don't know if you guys know this but I'm sort of a big deal."

"Isn't this the prettiest little thing you've ever seen? It was over a year ago I held this belt high in the air after I fought for it for the first time in Dayton, Ohio against Samoa Joe and I proclaimed this belt the most important thing to me. Right now, in my hands, as of this day 6/18/05, THIS becomes the most important belt in the world! This belt in the hands of any other man is just a belt, but in my hands it becomes power. Just like this microphone in the hands of any of the boys in the back is just a microphone, but in the hands of a dangerous man like myself it becomes a pipe-bomb. These words that I speak spoken by anybody else are just words strung loosely together to form sentences. What I say I mean, and what I mean I say, and they become anthems! You see, if I could be afforded the time here a little bit of a story. There was once an old man, walking home from work. He was walking in the snow, and he stumbled upon a snake frozen in the ice. He took that snake, and he brought it home, and he took care of it, and he thawed it out, and he nursed it back to health. And as soon as that snake was well enough, it bit the old man. And as the old man lay there dying he asked the snake, 'Why? I took care of you. I loved you. I saved your life.' And that snake looked that man right in the eye and said, 'You stupid old man. I'm a snake.' The greatest thing the devil ever did was make you people believe he didn't exist...and you're looking at him right now! I AM THE DEVIL HIMSELF! And all of you stupid, mindless people fell for it! You all believed in the same make-believe superhero that the legendary Ricky 'The Dragon' Steamboat saw some year ago today. No, you see, you don't know anything. You followed me hook-line and sinker, all of you did, and I'm not mad at you...I just feel sorry for you. This belongs to me! Everything you see here belongs to me, and I did what I had to do to get my hands on this. Now I am the GREATEST PRO WRESTLER walkin' the Earth today! This is my stage, this is my theater, you are my puppets! When I pulled those marionette strings, and I moved your emotions, and I played with them, and honestly it's 'cause I get off on it. I hate each and every single one of you with a thousand burns and I will not stop...I will not stop until I prove that I am better than you, that I am better than Low Ki, that I am better than AJ Styles! I'm better than Samoa Joe. Ladies and gentlemen, the champ is here! You don't have to love it, but you better learn to accept it. 'Cause I'm taking this with me, and there's not a single person in that locker room that can stop me!"

"Before you cut me off, Raven, the reason I hate you, the reason in my heart of hearts why I hate you, is I did not know any better when I was a little kid. When my dad came home smelling like beer. I thought it was a hard day’s work he was doing. I did not realize he was out at a bar. I did not realize ‘work’ meant ‘unemployment office.’ I did not think it was strange for someone to come home and take an Old Style up into the shower. I did not think it was strange for somebody to pass out. I thought an Old Style, a pack a day, was the norm. Raven, my father is exactly like you. Since day one of Ring of Honor, where fighting spirit is supposed to be revered, things are not supposed to be this way! I’d shake your hand like a normal man, but the thing is, I don’t respect you! I hate you! I hate you for everything you have pissed away! Everything I have scrapped and clawed for that I haven’t even earned yet! That you got handed to you and you flushed down the toilet! For what? For pills? For booze? For alcohol? For women? I’m born of your poison society. So, on the 17th of July, I will become a monster to fight the monsters of the world! Your time in Ring of Honor will be done. That is a promise. This is true! This is real! This is straight edge!"

"I get more out of life just being myself, by just being a human being. Not by being a rock star, not by being whatever. Sometimes I act like a jerk, but I think people respect me for being myself. That's the ultimate thing about the Smashing Pumpkins."

"Nineties rock guitar began with a tug-of-war between shred and grunge, but Billy Corgan found a unique solution to the conflict. The hulking Smashing Pumpkins frontman and chief songwriter dabbled in both styles, and then some. Corgan created guitar armadas, placing up to 40 guitar overdubs on a single track. These stuck out in an alternative scene that was competing to make the most lo-fi album. The Pumpkins’ defiantly massive orchestrations were inspired by the shoegaze scene and unfashionable pomp rockers like Queen and Boston. He fully harnessed the Big Muff fuzz’s potential to create a wall of noise, and like his heroes Cheap Trick, created a sound that was equal parts rock fury and pop magic. When metal was a dirty word, Corgan embraced Sabbath and Van Halen, revealing an artist always unafraid to be himself."

"People act like Nirvana invented grunge; they just took it and personified it."

"We have a problem with any labels that people try to hang on us, because all it does is drag you down."

"The Smashing Pumpkins was never meant to be a small band. It was going to either be a big band, or a no band."

"To me, music was about being accepted and escaping from this crummy existence."

"My earliest memory is of feeling different. My parents told me that I wasn't like other children."

"When you move artistically, the natural inclination is to denounce everything that's gone before."

"The closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets."

"I have a hard time thinking of men trying to sing my songs, because I think my perspective is very much feminine... For me the idea of having a feminine perspective is a willingness to be vulnerable. It's very easy to cock-rock and posture. I can't help but wear my heart on my sleeve—I'm like nervous endings. That's just the way that I am and, to me, that's very female because it's not a male thing to do. A male thing to do would be to fuckin' posture."

"I think the original, 'They're the next Jane's Addiction' things that people said about us in the beginning have been pretty much wiped out."

"The simplest way that I can understand therapy is that we're born a certain way, we're taught to be something different, and we spend our whole lives trying to unravel it and ultimately align ourselves with who we really are. Life, experiences, traumas -- whatever -- they all add up to make you some altered version of what you are. So there's this battle that goes on between what you are and what you become, and it's been very important for me to unravel what I was taught to be or what I became. and to draw a direct parallel to music -- the closer I get back to being who I really am, the stronger the music gets, because I think what talent I do have is connected to that person, it's not a manipulative process, it's intuitive. You can learn about chords and guitars, but there's a piece of you that makes it individual, and it's been a slow process for me to become whatever it is that I'm supposed to be."

"‘What happened when alternative music came out was authentic. It was a reflection of what was happening at the time and it had to do with authenticity. This is the reflection of the authenticity now. We’re in the reflection of it."

"I’m trying to figure out how to take the instrument and have it still sound like a guitar, but put you in a different universe."

"Life is everything and nothing all at once."

"For a 6-foot-3 guy with no hair and a whiny voice, I've done all right."

"Music is 99% of my life. But I know I need a break. Besides, if you give people too much, they start to not want it. We need to restrain ourselves."

"...What people miss about (Marilyn) Manson is that he is just reflecting, he's an artist, people want to focus that energy on him, but it's not really him, it's really about you. So for every guy sitting there with a beer and a .45 in his belt, Manson is just speaking to that end of society. He's speaking as an artist. He's not speaking as himself, and that's where people get really lost with Manson."

"I don't necessarily believe that the sting of failure is a bad thing. It gives you a certain amount of freedom to just say fuck it!"

"This is not a reaction against a negative world. It's a response to a negative world."

"One of the other reasons that we quit having journalists come here is because they would kind of hang out for several days, and they'd see me around at the clubs, and the story would get written and it would be me and my 'disciples' or my 'acolytes.' The word acolyte - that's like fuck you. These are my friends, but because they're not Billy Corgan or Helena Christensen, they become my 'posse' or my 'followers,' and it's like, fuck you for insulting my friends like that. That's so fucking incredible to me."

"Actually, I was having dinner with Michael (Stipe, of R.E.M.) when our second album went platinum, which up until that point was the highest success we'd ever had. And he turned to me during dinner and said, 'Welcome to the deep waters, kid.' I'll never forget that."

"My mother came to a Smashing Pumpkins gig once, and I was wearing a dress. She was very upset. She said, 'Everyone's gonna think you're a fag.' I said,'Well, they already think I'm an asshole.'"

"We're like a really nice drink. We help people get through the day--we make life a little sunnier. I don't think we have any profound effect. If anybody has had a profound effect, it's The Beatles, and their effect is still minimal. There are things in the world way more important than music. Family is 50 times more important than music."

"People always called The Cure gloomy, but listening to The Cure made me happy. There was something about the gloominess that gave me comfort, and I think we're the same way."

"I'm Irish and I was born on St. Patrick's Day. I'm lucky sevens."

"The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it's a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too."

"About six months ago, I listened to Siamese Dream. That was the first time I'd ever really heard my own album, because I had separated from the experience of making the record. And it really moved me. It made me cry, it's so beautiful."

"There's a really a cold, cold side to my personality that I'm not really comfortable with. I'm constantly dealing with that side of my personality versus my overly sentimental side… There's just a side that's a real motherfucker side; it's nothing I want to admit or even look at. It's where a lot of my strength lies. It's been the part of me that's been able to steel my spine against situations that probably would have broken a lot of people, or caused them to jump off the loop."

"...Instead of taking the 'I'm cool, I hope you adore me' path (with my music), I chose the path of how to connect. I think that's the reason a lot of people feel a deeper connection with our band than other bands, and I also feel that's why people polarize on us. If you don't get it, it seems preposterous; if you do get it, it's really heavy -- it has a weight to it."

"It's about the girlfriend who left me last year. I tried to put all my anger in those words, even though I'm just as much to blame for the break-up. 'Soma' is based on the idea that a love relationship is almost the same as opium: it slowly puts you to sleep, it soothes you, and gives you the illusion of sureness and security. Very deceivable."

"Science is not about control. It is about cultivating a perpetual sense of wonder in the face of something that forever grows one step richer and subtle than our latest theory about it. It is about reverence, not mastery."

"What he had done, how he had chosen to spend his energies, really was science. A way of looking, reverencing. And the purpose of all science, like living, which amounts to the same thing, was not the accumulations of Gnostic power, fixing of formulas for the names of God, stockpiling brutal efficiency, accomplishing the sadistic myth of progress. the purpose of science was to revive and cultivate a perpetual state of wonder. For nothing deserved wonder so much as our capacity to feel it."

"All we can ever do is lay a word in the hands of those who have put one in ours."

"To anyone who has spent a winter in the and known the depths to which the snow can reach, known the weeks when the stays below , the first hint of spring is a major event. You must live in the north to understand it. You cannot just come up for it as you might to Florida for the sunshine and the surf. To appreciate it, you must wait for it for a long time, hope and dream about it, and go through considerable enduring."

"A new adventure is coming up and I'm sure it will be a good one."

"... Here were young and with an occasional and a ground cover of , , and . I listened to the violin notes of a , the flutelike call of a , the teacher-teacher of an . Following one of the logging roads almost hidden with grass and cover, I flushed a partridge with a flock of well-grown chicks. A deer had walked across the trail, and I found the pellet of a . Here was food, abundant food — berries, buds, worms, insects and mice — and this was a place for living things."

"s must be able to slide instantly into the water, cannot waste precious moments struggling over land. No creature is clumsier out of its element than this great diver of the north."

"Wilderness to the people of America is a spiritual necessity, an antidote to the high pressure of modern life, a means of regaining serenity and equilibrium."

"The revolution will not be televised The revolution is here"

"Recently, John and I got to go to Selma and perform “Glory” on the same bridge that Dr. King and the people of the civil rights movement marched on 50 years ago. This bridge was once a landmark of a divided nation, but now is a symbol for change. The spirit of this bridge transcends race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and social status. The spirit of this bridge connects the kid from the South Side of Chicago, dreaming of a better life, to those in France standing up for their freedom of expression, to the people in Hong Kong protesting for democracy. This bridge was built on hope, welded with compassion, and elevated by love for all human beings."

"I went to the movies — it was Kanye, myself and John Mayer, and we went to see "Ray." We were watching it, and I was just inspired by the movie, just as a musician and as an artist, I felt inspired. We left there and went straight to the studio. Kanye started cooking up this beat and started doing this chant, like, "Go, go, go," and while we were sitting there thinking what to write, John Mayer said, "You could write about your fantasy." And I was like, "Am I going to let John Mayer come up with the concept for this joint? This is hip-hop." But John Mayer is a very talented brother and you don't know where your blessings are going to come from. He was singing, and we made him a sample on it, going 'Go.' So it all came together and now we have the song 'Go!,' which is about going to my fantasy."