John Lydon Quotes

Punk recognised the fact that the establishment had no room. There's no point in saying you've got the establishment wrong because they hadn't got the establishment wrong, they'd got it absolutely dead on.

I am not an anarchist, but I am anarchistical.

I used to read Gore Vidal books and think I was cool.

North American leftists just keep trying to relive the '60s, or to make the '60s happen again.

Every generation has someone who steps outside the norm and offers a voice for the unspeakable attitudes of that time. I represent everything that's supposed to be wrong, everything that's forbidden.

I'm interested in philosophical psychology, people like Nietzsche, Freud, Alcan, Foucault, Derrida.

As I say, the Animals had a particular concept of themselves as a band. There was an anarchic spirit in it, which was being flattened by commercial designs, attitudes, and needs.

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

I've read plenty of J.G. Ballard, but I'm not really a Ballardian. I've met Ballardians, and I know when I can't compete. I like Ballard in his relatively unchallenging apocalyptic mode: 'Vermilion Sands,' 'The Drowned World,' 'The Burning World,' 'The Crystal World.'

For me and my entire generation, we took on this kind of sarcastic, ironic, snarkiness because it seemed the most extreme reaction to the earnestness of hippies.

To an Ohio boy, it represented world-weary Gallic shrugs and Gauloises cigarettes, existentialist thinkers in berets and Catherine Deneuve in nothing at all - French was the language of intellectual power and effortless sex appeal.

The conception that, instead of this, contemporary society is at or near a turning point is very prominent in the views of a school of social scientists who, though they are still comparatively few, are getting more and more of a hearing.

I want three words: Woman, Atheist, Anarchist. That's me.

All good art is seditious, but the people in authority can never recognise it. I think when you mention sedition, artists are the ones whose eyes light up thinking, 'Oh, yes, I want some of that!'

When I was fifteen, I used to run around reading 'Adbusters' and dumpster diving, trying to find ways to make the U.S. government unwind into chaos through hardcore punk and metal.

Marxism is the opium of the intellectuals.

On one level the sixties revolt was an impressive illustration of Lenin's remark that the capitalist will sell you the rope to hang him with.

There’s no reason why an anarchist can’t be a saint.

My critics were entirely right in writing that certain fundamental ideas in my article would, if pursued to their conclusion, result in the dissolution of the left-wing cultural movement.

An anarchist is just a bourgeois turned inside out.

It is the tragic story of the cultural crusader in a mass society that he cannot win, but that we would be lost without him.

The conquest of cultural power comes before political power and this is achieved through the concerted action of intellectual ‘organic’ call-outs. Infiltrated into all of the communication, expression, and academic media.

What if the counterculture was only a stumbling beginning, rather than the best that could be hoped for?

The ideology of Miller's 'lost boys' is an incandescent mix derived from PlayStation violence, Iraq news footage, Peter Pan, William Burroughs's 'Wild Boys,' and anti-G8 millenarianism.

There is something familial about punk. There is something positive. Even though some punk is destructive, nihilistic, explosive.