John Lydon Quotes

In my parents' generation, rebellion was pop culture. It's not anymore.

History shows us that the youth are usually a step ahead of their elders when change is required.

My generation, we're so smart and opinionated, and we know the world we want to live in; we know the future we want. We're such a liberal, forward-thinking generation that's been held back by an older generation that doesn't understand it, doesn't want the world to progress quickly because of old ideologies.

I think my whole generation's mission is to kill the cliche.

Like art, revolutions come from combining what exists into what has never existed before.

If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technology.

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.

I think the Sixties in some ways is a barrier to young people today. They think of it, you know, what we're doing is not that. But it's partly the myth of the Sixties. It always felt embattled and small. It always, almost always, was a small group of people relative to the opposition around.

Art, freedom and creativity will change society faster than politics.

The hippie movement politicized my generation. When it ended, we all started looking back at our own history, looking, in my case, for motives of rebellion.

You just never know when today's cultural outcasts will become tomorrow's cultural icons.

Nations are liable to various revolutions in the state of their minds, and extent of their knowledge, as well as in their power and wealth ….

Despite the unquestionable greatness of the Anglo-Saxon genius, it is impossible not to see that the laws of revolutions are least understood precisely in the Anglo-Saxon countries.

The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them.

Civilization may be said indeed to be the creation of its outlaws.

I've never regretted I was born too soon. I'm proud to be a child of the twentieth century. I'm satisfied to join its ranks on our side and fight for a new world.

Alice thought, No. It wasn't the War and the disgruntled veterans; it wasn't the droves and droves of colored people flocking to paychecks and streets full of themselves. It was the music. The dirty, get-on-down music the women sang and the men played and both danced to, close and shamelesss or apart and wild...It made you do unwise disorderly things. Just hearing it was like violating the law.

It's good for young people to be angry about something.

Every generation reinvents the wheel - and in the process it often adds to rather than subtracts from a woman's burdens.

It's all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

Whereas the health of an individual depends on the ego's regular descent and return to and from the unconscious, a society's longevity depends on actual people journeying into the unknown and returning with ideas.

The Sixties was a perfect storm of disaffection with political leaders trying to pass off the same old platitudes to maintain the status quo and an unexpected courageousness in the masses of youth. Nothing on this scale had ever happened before in U.S. history and it hasn't happened since.

If punk was about getting rid of hippies, then I'm getting rid of grunge.

During the sixties, all the risk-type sports were very popular, because everybody was rebelling against their parents, or rebelling against the whole system. But those days are over. This is the day of conservatism.

There was a cultural war going on, the '60s was going on. All the film critics were square.