John Lennon Quotations

I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?

Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.

Love is the flower you've got to let grow.

Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.

We've got this gift of love, but love is like a precious plant. You can't just accept it and leave it in the cupboard or just think it's going to get on by itself. You've got to keep watering it. You've got to really look after it and nurture it.

Imagine all the people living life in peace. You may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one. I hope someday you'll join us, and the world will be as one.

I believe in God, but not as one thing, not as an old man in the sky. I believe that what people call God is something in all of us. I believe that what Jesus and Mohammed and Buddha and all the rest said was right. It's just that the translations have gone wrong.

If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it 'Chuck Berry'.

All we are saying is give peace a chance.

And God help Bruce Springsteen when they decide he's no longer God... They'll turn on him, and I hope he survives it.

I get by with a little help from my friends.

I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity.

If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal.

Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it.

Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock and roll or Christianity.

When you're drowning, you don't say 'I would be incredibly pleased if someone would have the foresight to notice me drowning and come and help me,' you just scream.

Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something.

Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it.

The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war -for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I'd say we deserve ours more.

I'm not going to change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything.

Love is the answer, and you know that for sure; Love is a flower, you've got to let it grow.

My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.

Rituals are important. Nowadays it's hip not to be married. I'm not interested in being hip.

Everybody loves you when you're six foot in the ground.

The more I see the less I know for sure.

As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.

You don't need anybody to tell you who you are or what you are. You are what you are!

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there'd be peace.

Surrealism had a great effect on me because then I realised that the imagery in my mind wasn't insanity. Surrealism to me is reality.

It doesn't matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I'm a woman or a man.

If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it.

He didn't come out of my belly, but my God, I've made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I'm so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride.

It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. You'd wake up in a concert and think, Wow, how did I get here?

You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die.

These critics with the illusions they've created about artists - it's like idol worship. They only like people when they're on their way up... I cannot be on the way up again.

There's nothing you can know that isn't known.

God is a concept by which we measure our pain.

You're just left with yourself all the time, whatever you do anyway. You've got to get down to your own God in your own temple. It's all down to you, mate.

Yeah we all shine on, like the moon, and the stars, and the sun.

Part of me suspects that I'm a loser, and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow's nest of that ship.

Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry.

You have to be a bastard to make it, and that's a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.

The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction.

We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first, rock 'n' roll or Christianity.

The basic thing nobody asks is why do people take drugs of any sort? Why do we have these accessories to normal living to live? I mean, is there something wrong with society that's making us so pressurized, that we cannot live without guarding ourselves against it?

Possession isn't nine-tenths of the law. It's nine-tenths of the problem.

I don't believe in killing whatever the reason!

I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love.

I think that through that kind of incredible, strange confrontation, people started to understand me,

I would have turned round right then and walked away.

We were a band who made it very, very big. That's all.

Those in the cheaper seats clap. The rest of you rattle your jewelry.

Tame birds sing of freedom. Wild birds fly.

Life is very short, and there's no time for fussing and fighting my friends

What can I tell you about myself that you have not already found out from those who do not lie?

Now in the sixties we were naive, like children. Everybody went back to their rooms and said, 'We didn't get a wonderful world of just flowers and peace and happy chocolate, and it won't be just pretty and beautiful all the time,' and just like babies everyone went back to their rooms and sulked. 'We're going to stay in our rooms and play rock and roll and not do anything else, because the world's a horrible place, because it didn't give us everything we cried for.' Right?

You may say I'm a dreamer, But I'm not the only one.I hope some day you'll join usand the world will be as one.

They torture and scare you for twenty odd years... then they expect you to pick a career.

It's always in the middle of the bloody night, or when you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them.

Nothing's gonna change my world, Nothing's gonna change my world.

Because you know you're never going to get in Billboard.

I don't know how much money I've got . . . I did ask the accountant how much it came to. I wrote it down on a bit of paper. But I've lost the bit of paper.

If I ate it would go right to my knee.

The Legendary Life of a Rock Star Drummer

As a child I did a lot of imaginary bits, you know. It depends on the individual, I enjoyed then knocking the nail in, I enjoy knocking nails in walls to hang pictures up, but I also enjoy thinking 'I'm gonna do that' but I actually won't do it, I enjoy imagining doing things just as much.

I think middle-class people have the biggest trauma if they have nice imagey parents, all smiling and dolled up.

If you're an unknown artist you're lucky to get an hour in a studio - it's a hierarchy and if you don't have hits, you don't get recorded again.

To begin with, working class people reacted against our openness about sex. They are frightened of nudity, they're repressed in that way as well as others. Perhaps they thought 'Paul [McCartney] is a good lad, he doesn't make trouble'.

I was a great one as a kid for standing and just looking out a window for hours and hours and hours. Now the TV does that for me, except for the view changes immensely.

It seems to me that the students are now half-awake enough to try and wake up their brother workers. If you don't pass on your own awareness then it closes down again.

I thought I was painting in sound a picture of revolution - but I made a mistake, you know. The mistake was that it was anti-revolution.

I mean we [The Beatles] had to go through humiliation upon humiliation with the middle classes and showbiz and Lord Mayors and all that. They were so condescending and stupid. Everybody trying to use us. It was a special humiliation for me because I could never keep my mouth shut and I'd always have to be drunk or pilled to counteract this pressure. It was really hell .

I found I was having continually to please the sort of people I'd always hated when I was a child. This began to bring me back to reality.

I began to realise that we are all oppressed which is why I would like to do something about it, though I'm not sure where my place is.

All the revolutions have happened when a Fidel or Marx or Lenin or whatever, who were intellectuals, were able to get through to the workers. They got a good pocket of people together and the workers seemed to understand that they were in a repressed state.

The only reason I went for that goal is that I wanted to say: 'Now, mummy-daddy, will you love me?'

When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids.

Most of the songs came from Europe and Africa and now they were coming back to us. Many of [Bob] Dylan's best songs came from Scotland, Ireland or England. It was a sort of cultural exchange.

Before many black singers were still labouring under that problem of God; it was often 'God will save us'. But right through the blacks were singing directly and immediately about their pain and also about sex, which is why I like it.

When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying 'Well, I'll get over it'. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it.

When I was a child I experienced moments of not wanting to see the ugliness, not wanting to see not being wanted. This lack of love went into my eyes and into my mind.

How can you talk about power to the people unless you realise the people is both sexes.

The first thing we did was to proclaim our Liverpoolness to the world, and say 'It's all right to come from Liverpool and talk like this'. Before, anybody from Liverpool who made it, like Ted Ray, Tommy Handley, Arthur Askey, had to lose their accent to get on the BBC.

All of us growing up have come to terms with too much pain. Although we repress it, it's still there. The worst pain is that of not being wanted, of realising your parents do not need you in the way you need them.

Of course it's difficult to know what the workers are really thinking because the capitalist press always only quotes mouthpieces like Vic Feather anyway.

There were very few real folk singers you know, though I liked Dominic Behan a bit and there was some good stuff to be heard in Liverpool. Just occasionally you hear very old records on the radio or TV of real workers in Ireland or somewhere singing these songs and the power of them is fantastic.

I didn't really know that much about the Maoists, but I just knew that they seemed to be so few and yet they painted themselves green and stood in front of the police waiting to get picked off.

I thought the original Communist revolutionaries coordinated themselves a bit better and didn't go around shouting about it.

As someone from the working class I was always interested in Russia and China and everything that related to the working class, even though I was playing the capitalist game.

Today's folk song is rock and roll. Although it happened to emanate from America, that's not really important in the end because we wrote our own music and that changed everything.

I keep on reading the Morning Star newspaper to see if there's any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals.

After the revolution you have the problem of keeping things going, of sorting out all the different views. It's quite natural that revolutionaries should have different solutions, that they should split into different groups and then reform, that's the dialectic, isn't it - but at the same time they need to be united against the enemy, to solidify a new order.

I enjoyed it when football crowds in the early days would sing 'All together now' - that was another one. I was also pleased when the movement in America took up 'Give peace a chance' because I had written it with that in mind really.

The more reality we face, the more we realise that unreality is the main programme of the day. The more real we become, the more abuse we take, so it does radicalise us in a way, like being put in a corner. But it would be better if there were more of us.

Mostly folk music is people with fruity voices trying to keep alive something old and dead. It's all a bit boring, like ballet: a minority thing kept going by a minority group.

Some people say it's a when you get older fans the kids don't like you. It's true.

It seems that all revolutions end up with a personality cult - even the Chinese seem to need a father-figure.