John Lennon Quotations | Page 2

Like Paul Kraston said, all I ask in life is a water bed, a TV and a typewriter. Well, I'll just have an ordinary bed, a TV and a guitar.

When I was singing about 'All You Need Is Love' I was talking about something I hadn't experienced.

It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko [Ono]. She's a red hot liberationistand was quick to show me where I was going wrong, even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That's why I'm always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women.

That's the choice they allow you - now the outlet is being a pop star, which is really what I'm saying on the album in 'Working class hero'. As I told Rolling Stone, it's the same people who have the power, the class system didn't change one little bit.

'Revolution' . There were two versions of that song but the underground left only picked up on the one that said 'count me out'.

I'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority.

Yoko [Ono] was well into liberation before I met her. She'd had to fight her way through a man's world - the art world is completely dominated by men - so she was full of revolutionary zeal when we met.

Going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.

Once the new power has taken over they have to establish a new status quo just to keep the factories and trains running.

I've been reading [Nikita] Khrushchev Remembers. I know he's a bit of a lad himself - but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn't seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that's the difficulty.

After The Beatles came on the scene everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.

You'd have to give people free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more.

There are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.

We went to America a few times and [Brian] Epstein always tried to waffle on at us about saying nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George [Harrison] and I said 'Listen, when they ask next time, we're going to say we don't like that war and we think they should get right out.' That's what we did.

I must say the more interesting songs to me were the black ones because they were more simple.

I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution.

The second political thing I did was to say 'The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.' That really broke the scene, I nearly got shot in America for that. It was a big trauma for all the kids that were following us.

I always read the papers, the political bits.

We should be trying to reach the young workers because that's when you're most idealistic and have least fear.

It's pretty hard when you are Caesar and everyone is saying how wonderful you are and they are giving you all the goodies and the girls, it's pretty hard to break out of that, to say 'Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.'

I'd always felt repressed. We were all so pressurised that there was hardly any chance of expressing ourselves, especially working at that rate, touring continually and always kept in a cocoon of myths and dreams.

When we came along there was only Decca, Philips and EMI who could really produce a record for you. You had to go through the whole bureaucracy to get into the recording studio. You were in such a humble position, you didn't have more than 12 hours to make a whole album, which is what we did in the early days.

My father and mother split and I never saw my father until I was 20, nor did I see much more of my mother.

In Western-style Communism we would have to create an almost imaginary workers' image of themselves as the father-figure.

I had to really kill off all the religious myths. In the therapy you really feel every painful moment of your life - it's excruciating, you are forced to realise that your pain, the kind that makes you wake up afraid with your heart pounding, is really yours and not the result of somebody up in the sky. It's the result of your parents and your environment.

There was never any question about it: we [with Yoko Ono] had to have a 50-50 relationship or there was no relationship, I was quick to learn.

I recently got into Haiku in Japan and I just think it's fantastic. Obviously, when you get rid of a whole section of illusion in your mind you're left with great precision.

Yoko [Ono] was showing me some of these Haiku in the original. The difference between them and Long fellow is immense. Instead of a long flowery poem the Haiku would say 'Yellow flower in white bowl on wooden table' which gives you the whole picture.

You can't give a child too much love and if you love somebody, you can't be with them enough. There's no such thing.

I just like TV. I think to me, it replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away and they put a TV in instead and I got hooked on it.

If we took over Britain, then we'd have the job of cleaning up the bourgeoisie and keeping people in a revolutionary state of mind.

Now The Beatles are four separate people, we don't have the impact we had when we were together.

I've always been politically minded and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere.

In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in a sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there's many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I've been satirising the system since my childhood. I used to write magazines in school and hand them around.

I think it's false, shallow, to be giving to others when your own need is great. The idea is not to comfort people, not to make them feel better but to make them feel worse, to constantly put before them the degradations and humiliations they go through to get what they call a living wage.

We'd also have to infiltrate the army too, because they are well trained to kill us all.

There are places I'll remember All my life though some have changed Some forever not for better Some have gone and some remain All these places have their moments With lovers and friends I still can recall Some are dead and some are living In my life I've loved them all

Don't need a gun to blow your mind

I'm a moldy moldy man I'm moldy thru and thru I'm a moldy moldy man You would not think it true I'm moldy til my eyeballs I'm moldy til my toe I will not dance I shyballs I'm such a humble Joe.

Please don’t spoil my day; I’m miles away and, after all, I’m only sleeping.

As I play the game of life, I try to make it better each and every day. And when I struggle in the night, The magic of the music seems to light the way.

Remember to let her into your heart.

I dream in colour, and its always very surreal. My dream world is complete Hieronymus Bosch and Dali. I love it, I look forward to it every night

We want to go forward, but which way are we facing?

When you cross the street, take my hand

Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real.

We announce the birth of a conceptual country, NEWTOPIA. Citizenship of the country can be obtained by declaration of your awareness of NEWTOPIA. NEWTOPIA has no land, no boundaries, no passports, only people. NEWTOPIA has no laws other than cosmic. All people of NEWTOPIA are ambassadors of the country. As two ambassadors of NEWTOPIA, we ask for diplomatic immunity and recognition in the United Nations of our country and our people.

Everything is as important as everything else.

It came in a vision - a man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, 'From this day forward you are Beatles with an A.' Thank you Mister Man, they said, thanking him.

It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out.

Art is only a way of expressing pain.

I believe in everything until it's disproved.

Life is what happens to you while you're planning on doing something else.

That's what the great masters and mistresses have been saying ever since time began. They can point the way, leave signposts and little instructions in various books that are now called holy and worshipped for the cover of the book and not for what it says, but the instructions are all there for all to see, have always been and always will be.

There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love.

Slipping? We're bigger than Jesus.

Rituals are important.

I like rock & roll, and I don't like much else.

We gave up everything just to sit at your table.

One thing you can't hide - is when you're crippled inside.

Pools of sorrow. Waves of joy.

I don't believe in Beatles ...

There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn't see.

A Conspiracy of silence speaks louder than words.

The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn't represent the people. It controls them.

You're born in pain and pain is what we're in most of the time. And I think that the bigger the pain, the more gods we need.

Why is everyone telling me to do it? I already did it.

Link Wray and Gene Vincent.... two of the greatest unknowns of rock 'n' roll.

They want to hold onto something they never had in the first place. Anybody who claims to have some interest in me as an individual artist or even as part of the Beatles has absolutely misunderstood everything I ever said if they can't see why I'm with Yoko. And if they can't see that, they don't see anything. They're just jacking off to - it could be anybody. Mick Jagger or somebody else. Let them go jack off to Mick Jagger, okay? I don't need it.

Love is like a flower - you have to let it grow.

I don't believe in Beatles, I just believe in me.

Life is what happens when we are busy doing other things. Peace is not something you wish for; it's something you make, something you do, something you are and something you give away.

From this moment on I know exactly where my life will go: seems that all I really was doing was waiting for love.

No short-haired, yellow-bellied, son of tricky dicky Is gonna mother hubbard soft soap me With just a pocketful of soap.

Love is you, you and me. Love is knowing we can be.

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.

Living is Easy with Eyes Closed.

Nothing really affected me until Elvis.

You better get yourself together, darling, and join the human race.

I'd never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn't meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it.

When you're thirty-five, you can't take as much booze ... and I always got a little violent on drink...So it was kind of self-destructive suicide side of me, which is resolving itself for the better, I believe, because I never enjoyed it...

I thought of nothing else but rock 'n' roll; apart from sex and food and money--but that's all the same thing, really.

I realized that kids everywhere go for the same stuff; and seeing as we'd done it in England, there's no reason why we couldn't do it in America too.

We are all Christ and Hitler. Yoko and I want Christ to win.

People think the Beatles know what's going on. We don't. We're just doing it.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don't know anything.

Money can't buy me love.

I feel now at 53 I have grown into a deeper understanding of what a human life is.

You feel alone if you're the only one thinking 'wouldn't it be nice if there was peace and nobody was getting killed.' So advertise yourself that you're for peace if you believe in it.

You're jeans are full of crap. You're full of beans, you're in you teens. You've lost your mama's road map.

Don't let them fool you with dope and cocaine, can't do you know harm to feel your own pain.

I'll be a good boy, please make me well. I promise you anything, get me out of this hell. Cold turkey has got me on the run.

They told me I didn't understand the assignment, I told them they didn't understand life.

But for me at any rate it was all part of dissolving the God trip or father-figure trip. Facing up to reality instead of always looking for some kind of heaven.

When they've tortured and scared you for 20 odd years, then they expect you to pick a career.

They hit you at school, they hate you if your clever, and they despise a fool.

We're playing those mind games together, pushing the barriers, planting seeds, playing the mind guerilla.

Music touching my soul, the spirit dance was unfolding.

Everybody's talking about ministers, sinisters, banisters, and canisters, bishops, fishops, rabbis, and popeyes, bye-bye, bye-byes.

Millions of mind guerrillas, raising the spirit of peace and love, not war.