John Lennon

John Lennon (October 9, 1940 - December 8, 1980)
singer, songwriter, guitarist, writer, humorist, politician and painter.

Note: all song lyrics are still copyrighted.

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

• "Well, I just want him to grow up happy. That's the main thing"."
  • Talking about his son, Julian Lennon.

• "Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? All the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry."
  • During the November 4, 1963 Royal Variety Performance in London, attended (among others) by Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, and Princess Margaret. Note: John meant to say fucking jewelry. He was persuaded against doing so by Paul McCartney and the the group's manager Brian Epstein.

• "Life is what happens to you while you're busy making other plans."
  • From Beautiful Boy (Darling Boy) off the 1980 "Double Fantasy" album.

• "All that business was awful, it was a fuckin' humiliation. One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were, and that's what I resent. I didn't know, I didn't foresee. It happened bit by bit, gradually, until this complete craziness is surrounding you, and you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand - the people you hated when you were ten."
  • Quoted in Rolling Stone, Jan. 7 1971, 34, and requoted in The Sociology of Rock by Simon Frith, 1978, ISBN 0094602204

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

• "Women should be obscene and not heard."

• "I am the Walrus"

• "The Walrus was Paul!"

• "I was the Walrus, now I'm John"

• "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. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me."
  • Possibly the most controversial quote Lennon ever made. This quote was published in England's Evening Standard newspaper on March 4, 1966 as part of an interview with writer Maureen Cleave. Rather than a blatant attack on christianity, Lennon was sympathising with the current state of religion, saying it was a shame that the Beatles had become more important than religion. Religion held no interest for the youth of the time. This single quote (taken out of context) was to spark protests across the Bible Belt in America. Beatles records were burned en masse, and the Ku Klux Klan burned a Beatles effigy and nailed Beatles albums to a burning cross.

• "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."
  • News conference in Chicago, where he apologized for the above statement, which was accepted by the Vatican. (11 August 1966)

• "I really thought that love would save us all."

• "He's not even the best drummer in The Beatles"
  • When asked whether or not he beleived Ringo Star to be the best drummer in the world.