John Winston Lennon
1940-1980

Well, yeah... John Lennon is my favourite historical person. Many of you may be surprised that i call Lennon a "historical person", but I feel he deserves it...
Now I'm not speaking about his music, but rather his thoughts, his philosophy, and that is what i'm trying to reflect on this page.

• God (Dream is over)
• Working class hero
• Give peace a chance
• Merry XMAS (War is over)
• How...

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

• "I'm not saying 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."

• "Am I crazy or am I a genius? I don't think I'm either."

• "I'm not going to 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."

• "When I was a Beatle I thought we were the best fucking group in the god damn world, and believing that is what made us what we were."

• "We realized there's something wrong here, if everybody was upset by the fact that two people were naked."

• "I think the basic thing nobody asks is why do people takes drugs of any sort? And that question has to be resolved before you can think, well, what can we do for the poor drug addict? Why do we have to 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?.."

• "In 'Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds' I was visualizing Alice in Wonderland, an image of this female who would come and save me - a girl with kaleidescope eyes who would be the real love of my life. Lucy turned out to be Yoko."

• "Songwriting is about getting the demon out of me. It's like being posessed. 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. It's always in the middle of the night, or you're half-awake or tired, when your critical faculties are switched off. So letting go is what the whole game is. Every time you try to put your finger on it, it slips away. You turn on the lights and the cockroaches run away. You can never grasp them..."

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

• "I was too scared to break away from the Beatles, which I'd been looking to do since we stopped touring. And so I was sort of vaguely looking for somewhere to go but didn't have the nerve to really step out into the boat myself, so I sort of hung around, and when I met Yoko and fell in love, my God, this is different than anything before. This is more than a hit record. It's more than gold. It's more than everything...When I met Yoko is when you meet your first woman, and you leave the guys at the bar, and you don't go play football anymore. Once I found the woman, the boys became of no interest whatsoever, other than they were like old school friends."

• "I've always thought there was this underlying thing in Paul's 'Get Back.' When we were in the studio recording it, every time he sang the line 'Get back to where you once belonged," he'd look at Yoko."

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

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

• !!!! "You can't cheat kids. If you cheat them when they're children they'll make you pay when they're sixteen or seventeen by revolting against you or hating you or all those so-called teenage problems. I think that's finally when they're old enough to stand up to you and say, 'What a hypocrite you've been all this time. You've never given me what I really wanted, which is you." !!!!

• "The only time we took drugs was when we were without hope and the only way we got out of it was with hope and if we can sustain the hope then we don't need drugs, liquor or anything. But if we loose hope, what can you do? What is there to do?"

• "If The Beatles or the 60's had a message, it was 'Learn to swim. And once you've learned - swim!"

• "Living is easy with your eyes closed..."

• "I still don't know how to express the really delicate personal stuff. People think that Plastic Ono is very personal, but there are some subtleties of emotions which I cannot seem to express in pop music, and it frustrates me. Maybe that's why I still search for other ways of expressing myself. Songwriting is a limiting experience in some ways - writing down words that have to rhyme."

• "Nothing will stop me, and whether I'm here or wherever I may be, I'll always have the same feelings, I'll say what I feel."

• !!!! "The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time, because it's too hard...To put it loosely, the reason why kids are crazy is because nobody can face the responsibility of bringing them up..." !!!!

• "Why don't people believe us when we say we're simply in love?"

• "I've been baking bread and looking after the baby...Everyone else who has asked me that question over the last few years says. 'But what else have you been doing?' To which I say, 'Are you kidding?' Because bread and babies, as every housewife knows, is a full-time job. After I made the loaves [of bread,] I felt like I had conquered something. But as I watched the bread being eaten, I thought, Well, Jesus, don't I get a gold record or knighted or nothing?"

• "It just was a gradual development over the years. I mean last year was 'all you need is Love.' This year, it's 'all you need is Love and peace, baby.' Give peace a chance, and remember Love. The only hope for us is peace. Violence begets violence. You can have peace as soon as you like if we all pull together. You're all geniuses, and you're all beautiful. You don't need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are. Get out there and get peace, think peace, and live peace and breathe peace, and you'll get it as soon as you like."

• "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."

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

• "You make your own dream. That's the Beatles' story, isn't it? That's Yoko's story. That's what I'm saying now. Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do anything, but not to put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don't expect Jimmy Carter or Ronald 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. 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. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you."

• "We're all Christ and we're all Hitler. We are trying to make Christ's message contemporary. We want Christ to win. What would he have done if he had advertisements,T.V., records, films and newspapers? The miracle today is communication. So Let's use it."

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

• "People want peace. And you've got do sell it and sell it and sell it. So we do the bed-ins and they say, 'What? They're in bed? What's this?' And all we're doing really is donating our holiday. We get tired and it's...more convenient for us to stay in one spot than go around doing press conferences."

• "....the only way you can better John is by copying him exactly." - Yoko Ono Lennon