Top 400 John Lennon Quotes (2024 Update)
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401. “I think a lot of bad things have happened in the name of the church and in the name of Christ and therefore I shy away from church.”

— John Lennon

402. “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.”

— John Lennon

403. “I resent performing for frisking idiots who don’t know anything.”

— John Lennon

404. “I know I hurt you then But that was way back when.”

— John Lennon

405. “The whole thing died in my mind long before the rumpus started. We used to believe the Beatles myth just as much as the public and we were in love with them just the same way. But we were four individuals who eventually recovered our individualities after being submerged in a myth.”

— John Lennon

406. “People think the Beatles know what’s going on. We don’t. We’re just doing it.”

— John Lennon

407. “I didn’t come after Elvis and Dylan, I’ve been around always. But if I see or meet a great artist, I love ’em.”

— John Lennon

408. “In my case I’ve never not been political, though religion tended to overshadow it in my acid days.”

— John Lennon

409. “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.”

— John Lennon

410. “Nothing really affected me until Elvis.”

— John Lennon

411. “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.”

— John Lennon

412. “We gave up everything just to sit at your table.”

— John Lennon

413. “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.”

— John Lennon

414. “All this bit about angels and all the different religions, it’s based on something. I think anything’s possible. I believe in everything until it’s disproved.”

— John Lennon

415. “When I was singing about ‘All You Need Is Love’ I was talking about something I hadn’t experienced.”

— John Lennon

416. “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

417. “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.”

— John Lennon

418. “We never write anything with themes. We just write the same rubbish all the time.”

— John Lennon

419. “I don’t believe in killing whatever the reason!”

— John Lennon

420. “Why don’t people believe us when we say we’re simply in love?”

— John Lennon

421. “People are just up tight because the kids are having fun and they didn’t have the same freedom.”

— John Lennon

422. “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.”

— John Lennon

423. “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.”

— John Lennon

424. “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.”

— John Lennon

425. “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.”

— John Lennon

426. “I started being me about the songs, not writing objectively, but subjectively. I think it was Dylan who helped me realize that – not by any discussion or anything, but by hearing his work.”

— John Lennon

427. “I always read the papers, the political bits.”

— John Lennon

428. “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.”

— John Lennon

429. “We were really professional by the time we got to the States; we had learned the whole game. When we arrived here we knew how to handle the press; the British press were the toughest in the world and we could handle anything. We were all right.”

— John Lennon

430. “Somehow the revolutionaries must approach the workers because the workers won’t approach them. But it’s difficult to know where to start; we’ve all got a finger in the dam. The problem for me is that as I have become more real, I’ve grown away from most working-class people.”

— John Lennon

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

— John Lennon

432. “I don’t want to grow up but I’m sick of not growing up -? that way. I’ll find a different way of not growing up. There’s a better way of doing it than torturing your body.”

— John Lennon

433. “Ringo is Ringo, that’s all there is to it. And he’s every bloody bit as warm, unassuming, funny and kind as he seems. He was quite simply the heart of the Beatles.”

— John Lennon

434. “There was something wrong with me, I thought, because I seemed to see things other people didn’t see.”

— John Lennon

435. “Everything is as important as everything else.”

— John Lennon

436. “Only by trying on other people’s clothes do we find what size we are.”

— John Lennon

437. “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.”

— John Lennon

438. “We were cowards when we sacked him.”

— John Lennon

439. “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.”

— John Lennon

440. “Wouldn’t it be interesting to take Elvis back to his Sun Records period? I don’t know. But I’m content to listen to his Sun Records. I don’t want to dig him up out of the grave.”

— John Lennon

441. “Without Jimmy Dean, the Beatles never would have existed.”

— John Lennon