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When it gets down to having to use violence, then you are playing the system’s game. The establishment will irritate you – pull your beard, flick your face – to make you fight. Because once they’ve got you violent, then they know how to handle you. The only thing they don’t know how to handle is non-violence and humor.
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Happiness is just how you feel when you don't feel miserable.
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There are two basic motivating forces: fear and love. When we are afraid, we pull back from life. When we are in love, we open to all that life has to offer with passion, excitement, and acceptance. We need to learn to love ourselves first, in all our glory and our imperfections. If we cannot love ourselves, we cannot fully open to our ability to love others or our potential to create. Evolution and all hopes for a better world rest in the fearlessness and open-hearted vision of people who embrace life.
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It matters not who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it matters only that you love...
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We must always remember to thank the CIA and the Army for LSD. That's what people forget.... They invented LSD to control people and what they did was give us freedom.
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Part of me suspects that I'm a loser and the other part of me thinks I'm God Almighty.
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There is nothing conceptually better than rock 'n' roll. No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on Whole Lot of Shaking for my money. Or maybe I'm like our parents: that's my period and I dig it and I'll never leave it.
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Well, that's rubbish, you know. Nobody controls me. I'm uncontrollable. The only one who controls me is me, and that's just barely possible.
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I believe time wounds all heels.
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One has to completely humiliate oneself to be what the Beatles were . . . . It happened bit by bit, until . . . you're doing exactly what you don't want to do with people you can't stand -- the people you hated when you were ten.
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I think a label like 'avant-garde' defeats itself. You learn to have avant-garde exhibitions. The very fact that avant-garde can have an exhibition defeats the purpose of avant-garde, because it's already formalised and ritualised.
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Christianity will go.. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue with that; I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now; I don't know which will go first - rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It's them twisting it that ruins it for me.
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I'm not claiming divinity. I've never claimed purity of soul. I've never claimed to have the answers to life. I only put out songs and answer questions as honestly as I can … But I still believe in peace, love and understanding.
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I used to think it was mere homesickness, then I started getting it at home.
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The thing the sixties did was to show us the possibilities and the responsibility that we all had. It wasn't the answer. It just gave us a glimpse of the possibility.
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It's just natural, it's not a great disaster. People keep talking about it like it's The End of The Earth. It's only a rock group that split up, it's nothing important. You know, you have all the old records there if you want to reminisce.
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Listen, if anything happens to Yoko and me, it was not an accident.
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It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out. I don't appreciate worship of dead Sid Vicious or of dead James Dean or of dead John Wayne. It's the same thing. Making Sid Vicious a hero, Jim Morrison - it's garbage to me. I worship the people who survive. Gloria Swanson, Greta Garbo.
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Above all else never let people know how physically unattractive they actually are. Everyone deserves to believe they are beautiful.
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I'd like to say 'thank you' on behalf of the group and ourselves and I hope we passed the audition.
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Reality leaves a lot to the imagination.
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The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops - that'll be the time to worry. Not before.
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Well, I just want him to grow up happy. That's the main thing.
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We never made love in a bag. People probably imagined that we were making love. It was just, all of us are in a bag, you know. The point was the outline of the bag, you know, the movement of the bag, how much we see of a person, you know. But, inside, there might be a lot going on. Or maybe nothing's going on.