Time & Perspective Quote by Eddie Campbell

Duty used to mean silence. Campbell’s line catches that older moral economy in a single, bruising gesture: “shut up and get on with it” isn’t just advice, it’s a whole social technology for keeping people compliant. The first sentence sketches a type shaped by postwar Britain’s habits of restraint - the decent citizen who equates endurance with virtue and disturbance with selfishness. “Not cause any trouble” reads like a commandment from employers, institutions, even families: be manageable.

Then Campbell flips the cultural script with a quiet accusation: “In our own time we’ve made a hero of the rebel.” It’s not purely celebratory. There’s admiration in “more heroic to speak up,” but also skepticism about how heroism gets assigned. Modern culture doesn’t merely permit dissent; it packages it. The rebel becomes a role - branded, narrativized, rewarded with social capital. Speaking up can be brave, but it can also be performative, a shortcut to moral status in a media ecosystem that treats outrage and confession as content.

The subtext is generational and artistic. As a comics artist who’s spent his career around counterculture, punk energies, and literary self-mythmaking, Campbell knows how quickly rebellion becomes aesthetic: an attitude you can wear. The quote presses on an uncomfortable tension: we rightly distrust enforced stoicism, yet we also risk turning resistance into a prestige economy. Heroism shifts from endurance to disruption, and neither is automatically ethical. It depends on what’s at stake, and who pays the price.