John Lennon Quotes

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.

I am continually influenced by the feeling that music culture captured in the late 60s - for my generation, it was a time to rebel, against our parents, against everything.

In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint.

I was a kid at the end of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, so a lot of things changed. You had pop music coming up, with David Bowie, you had new television programmes and all these things. I was fascinated.

'Animal House' was sort of the first real, contemporary, youthful voice of the baby boom generation. It spoke to that audience, and it spoke to that part of me which was saying, 'Out with the old, in with the new.'

I think that, in the '60s, you had lots of things going on in the culture which tended to decrease attraction to marriage, attraction to religion, and which tended to increase attraction to crime.

Hip-hop became the voice of rebellion and the youth, as rock music did in the '60s.

It was a wonderful time to be young. The 1960s didn't end until about 1976. We all believed in Make Love Not War - we were idealistic innocents, darling, despite the drugs and sex. We were sweet lovely people who wanted to throw out all the staid institutions who placed money and wars above all else. When you're young you think that's how life works. None of us were famous, we were broke. We didn't think they'd be writing books about us in 30 years. We were just kids doing the right thing.

I don't know what you wanna describe as Rock 'n' Roll, but I certainly thought that 60s stuff, Bob Dylan and the Beatles, changed the world a little bit. But the effect seems to have retreated. I think it's harder than we think to change the world. These things go in cycles. It doesn't seem to have done an awful lot of good, does it? You know, all the talk of racial harmony and equality in the world... we haven't got a long way since the 60s.

Rock has always been the devil's music... I believe that rock & roll is dangerous... I feel that we're only heralding something even darker than ourselves.

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

. . . rock and roll, as I see it, is the ultimate populist art form, democracy in action, because it's true: anybody can do it.

Rock and Roll adolescent hoodlums storm the streets of all nations. They rush into the Louvre and throw acid in the Mona Lisa's face.

The youth rebellion [1968] is a worldwide phenomenon that has not been seen before in history. I do not believe they will calm down ad be ad execs at thirty as the Establishment would like us to believe.

My generation of radicals and breakers-down never found anything to take the place of the old virtues of work and courage and the old graces of courtesy and politeness.

Rock n Roll is music from the neck down.

Freedom to rock, freedom to talk. Freedom, raise your fist and yell.

I've embraced rock 'n' roll because it encompasses all the things I'm interested in: poetry, revolution, sexuality, political activism - all of these things can be found in rock 'n' roll. But I am also engaged in all of these things separately.

The white youth of today have begun to react to the fact that the American Way of Life is a fossil of history. What do they care if their old baldheaded and crew-cut elders don't dig their caveman mops? They couldn't care less about the old, stiff-assed honkies who don't like their new dances: Frog, Monkey, Jerk, Swim, Watusi. All they know is that it feels good to swing to way-out body-rhythms instead of dragging across the dance floor like zombies to the dead beat of mind-smothered Mickey Mouse music.

Elvis is the greatest cultural force in the twentieth century. He introduced the beat to everything, music, language, clothes, it's a whole new social revolution - the 60's comes from it.

When I went to school, it was right after the '60s and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in.... The idealistic wind of the '60s was still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that engrained in them forever.

There are a lot of people walking around with long hair now and some trendy middle class kids in pretty clothes. But nothing changed except that we all dressed up a bit, leaving the same bastards running everything.

Rock 'n' roll is just entertainment, and the kids who like to identify their youthful high spirits with a solid beat are thus possibly avoiding other pursuits that could be harmful to them.

The life before '68 was very different from the life after '68. Before '68, our days were full of authoritarian moments. There were authorities everywhere. In fact, the movement of '68 was young people against their authorities, children against their parents. And that remained. The most important thing of all, the thing that lasted, was the first feminist movement and the position of women in society. That completely changed and that was very, very important.

Rock'n'roll starts between the legs and goes through the heart, then to the head. As long as it does those three things, it's a great rock song.