Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.
– John Lennon
All we are saying is give peace a chance.
– John Lennon
As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.
– John Lennon
I regret profoundly that I was not an American and not born in Greenwich Village. It might be
dying, and there might be a lot of dirt in the air you breathe, but this is where it’s happening.
– John Lennon
Everything is clearer when you’re in love.
– John Lennon
We live in a world where we have to hide to make love, while violence is practiced in broad
daylight.
– John Lennon
Christianity 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.
– John Lennon
I suppose if I had said television was more popular than Jesus, I would have gotten away
with it. I’m sorry I opened my mouth. I’m not anti-God, anti-Christ, or anti-religion. I wasn’t
knocking it or putting it down. I was just saying it as a fact and it’s true more for England
than here. I’m not saying that we’re better or greater, or comparing us with Jesus Christ as a
person or God as a thing or whatever it is. I just said what I said and it was wrong. Or it was
taken wrong. And now it’s all this.
– John Lennon
If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.
– John Lennon
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 live as one.
– John Lennon
Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it
for me.
– John Lennon
A dream you dream alone is only a dream. A dream you dream together is reality.
– John Lennon
I don’t believe in killing, whatever the reason.
– John Lennon
Laurel and Hardy, that’s John and Yoko. And we stand a better chance under that guise
because all the serious people like Martin Luther King and Kennedy and Gandhi got shot.
– John Lennon
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.
– John Lennon
The world went mad and used us as an excuse.
– John Lennon
Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It’s quite possible to do
anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don’t expect Carter or
Reagan or – John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you.
You have to do it yourself.
– John Lennon
The reason why kids are crazy is because nobody can face the responsibility of bringing them
up.
– John Lennon
I don’t need to go to church. I respect churches because of the sacredness that’s been put
on them over the years by people who do believe. But I think a lot of bad things have
happened in the name of the church and in the name of Christ. Therefore I shy away from
church, and as Donovan once said, “I go to my own church in my own temple once a day.”
We’re all God. I’m not a god or the God, but we’re all God and we’re all potentially divine – and
potentially evil. We all have everything within us and the Kingdom of Heaven is nigh and within
us, and if you look hard enough you’ll see it.
– John Lennon
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.
– John Lennon
I don’t mind people putting us down, because if everybody really liked us, it would be a bore.
– John Lennon
I’m not gonna change the way I look or the way I feel to conform to anything. I’ve always
been a freak. So I’ve been a freak all my life and I have to live with that, you know. I’m one
of those people.
– John Lennon
If there hadn’t been an Elvis, there wouldn’t have been the Beatles.
– John Lennon
Nor do I think we came from monkeys, by the way… That’s another piece of garbage. What
the hell’s it based on? We couldn’t have come from anything – fish, maybe, but not monkeys.
I don’t believe in the evolution of fish to monkeys to men. Why aren’t monkeys changing into
men now? It’s absolute garbage. It’s absolutely irrational garbage, as mad as the ones who
believe the world was made only four thousand years ago, the fundamentalists.
– John Lennon
Part of me suspects that I’m a loser, and the other part of me thinks I’m God Almighty.
– John Lennon
Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE (Member of the Most Excellent
Order of the British Empire) received theirs for heroism in the war – for killing people. We
received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.
– John Lennon
Love is like a flower – you’ve got to let it grow.
– John Lennon
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.
– John Lennon
Avant-garde is French for bullshit.
– John Lennon
Newspaper people have a habit of putting you in the front pages to sell their papers, and
then after they’ve sold their papers and got big circulations, they say, “Look at what we’ve
done for you.”
– John Lennon
Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans.
– John Lennon
I’ve had the boyhood thing of being Elvis. Now I want to be with my best friend, and my best
friend’s my wife. Who could ask for anything more?
– John Lennon
Happiness is just how you feel when you don’t feel miserable.
– John Lennon
When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When
I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down “happy.”
They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.
– John Lennon
The more real you get the more unreal the world gets.
– John Lennon
I’m not afraid of dying. To me dying is like getting out of one car and into another.
– John Lennon
Count your age by friends, not years. Count your life by smiles, not tears.
– John Lennon
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?
– John Lennon
Love is a promise, love is a souvenir, once given never forgotten, never let it disappear.
– John Lennon
If I’d lived in Roman times, I’d have lived in Rome. Where else? Today America is the Roman
Empire and New York is Rome itself.
– John Lennon
Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we are being run by maniacs
with maniacal ends and I think I’m liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That’s
what’s insane about it.
– John Lennon
Rituals are important. Nowadays it’s hip not to be married. I’m not interested in being hip.
– John Lennon
I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence.
– John Lennon
We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD, by the way. Everything is
the opposite of what it is, isn’t it? They brought out LSD to control people, and what they did
was give us freedom. Sometimes it works in mysterious ways its wonders to perform. But it
sure as hell performs them. If you look at the government report book on acid, the only ones
who jumped out of windows because of it were the ones in the Army. I never knew anybody
who jumped out of a window or killed themselves because of it.
– John Lennon
Make love, not war.
– John Lennon
God is a concept by which we measure our pain.
– John Lennon
Slipping? We’re bigger than Jesus.
– John Lennon
Everybody loves you when you’re six foot in the ground.
– John Lennon
In England, there are only two things to be, basically: You are either for the labor movement
or for the capitalist movement.
– John Lennon
I’ve always considered my work one piece and I consider that my work won’t be finished until
I am dead and buried and I hope that’s a long, long time.
– John Lennon
It’s better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out… I worship the people who survive.
– John Lennon
They torture and scare you for twenty odd years. Then they expect you to pick a career.
– John Lennon
I’ve never met anybody who’s had a flashback in my life and I took millions of trips in the
Sixties and I’ve never met anybody who had any problem. I’ve had bad trips, but I’ve had bad
trips in real life. I’ve had a bad trip on a joint. I can get paranoid just sitting in a restaurant. I
don’t have to take anything.
– John Lennon
Paranoia is just a heightened sense of awareness.
– John Lennon
It was just a gradual development over the years. Last year was “All You Need Is Love.” This
year it’s “Give Peace a Chance.” Remember love. The only hope for any of us is peace.
Violence begets violence. If you want to get peace, you can get it as soon as you like if we
all pull together. You’re all geniuses and you’re all beautiful. You don’t need anybody to tell
you who you are or what you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace. Think
peace, live peace, and breathe peace and you’ll get it as soon as you like. Okay?
– John Lennon
I wouldn’t say I was a born writer; I’m a born thinker.
– John Lennon
I’ve had cocaine, but I don’t like it. The Beatles had lots of it in their day, but it’s a dumb
drug, because you have to have another one 20 minutes later. Your whole concentration
goes on getting the next fix. Really, I find caffeine is easier to deal with.
– John Lennon
Women should be obscene and not heard.
– John Lennon
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.
– John Lennon
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.
– John Lennon
One thing you can’t hide – is when you’re crippled inside.
– John Lennon
Limitless, undying love which shines about me like a million suns, it calls me on and on across
the universe.
– John Lennon
There are two basic motivating forces: Fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from
life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and
acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If
we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential
to create.
– John Lennon
Life is very short, and there’s no time for fussing and fighting my friends.
– John Lennon
I’m not really a career person; I’m a gardener, basically.
– John Lennon
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.
– John Lennon
The more I see, the less I know for sure.
– John Lennon
You have to be a bastard to make it, and that’s a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest
bastards on earth.
– John Lennon
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?
– John Lennon
I’m a dreamer but I’m not the only one.
– John Lennon
We’re trying to sell peace, like a product, you know, and sell it like people sell soap or soft
drinks. And it’s the only way to get people aware that peace is possible, and it isn’t just
inevitable to have violence.
– John Lennon
Song writing is about getting the demon out of me. It’s like being possessed. You try to go to
sleep, but the song won’t let you. So you have to get up and make it into something, and then
you’re allowed to sleep.
– John Lennon
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 on watering it. You’ve got to really look after
it and nurture it.
– John Lennon
Living is easy with eyes closed.
– John Lennon
For those of you in the cheap seats I’d like you to clap your hands to this one; the rest of
you can just rattle your jewellery!
– John Lennon