Quotes from Jon Savage

in 1762, Rousseau argued that puberty had such fundamental emotional and mental effects that it represented "a second birth.

To ignore those who stand out as harbingers in favor of those cleave to the status quo is to refuse engagement with the future if not to misunderstand the nature of youth itself

Social control through consumerism might have been more benign than through more totalitarian methods, but it set up different kinds of distortions that were increasingly enacted in the deep oscillation between hedonism and puritanism.

It was no surprise that upper-class and upper-middle-class young men thronged the recruitment halls. They had been primed for war on the playing fields, in their self-regulated peer societies, through the ethos of muscular Christianity.

The disparity between the idealism of 1914 and the reality of war was so great that combatants and noncombatants alike had to find myths that would give meaning to the meaningless.