"We have the same spirit, the sense of humor, and self irony, we still want to be together and confront, even to quarrel, but to be anyway and always friends. If it wasn't this way when we started, U2 would never exist, we couldn't do anything. And I don't think any of us could play music without a band like us. It was punk era, but we were different, because when in London most thought to the hairs or dresses of musicians, not many, apart from the poet John Cooper Clark or the Clash, talked about social problems and we did. We were only simple boys who wrote and sang hard political lyrics that people liked and we could come out." - Edge on what remained from the early years, 1998