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The worst drugs are as bad as anybody's told you. It's just a dumb trip, which I can't condemn people if they get into it, because one gets into it for one's own personal, social, emotional reasons. It's something to be avoided if one can help it.
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Nobody controls me. I'm uncontrollable. The only one who can control me is me, and even that's barely possible.
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There's nothing new under the sun. All the roads lead to Rome. And people cannot provide it for you. I can't wake you up. You can wake you up. I can't cure you. You can cure you.
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I just like TV. I think to me, it replaced the fireplace when I was a child. They took the fire away and they put a TV in instead and I got hooked on it.
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I'll probably be popped off by some loony.
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The people have the power. All we have to do is awaken the power in the people.
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What we’ve got to do is keep hope alive. Because without it we’ll sink.
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I was trying to say something about Christianity, the idea that you have to be tortured to attain heaven. I didn't believe that.
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Going to America increased the build up on me, especially as the war was going on there. In a way we'd turned out to be a Trojan horse. The 'Fab Four' moved right to the top and then sang about drugs and sex and then I got into more and more heavy stuff and that's when they started dropping us.
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I used to hide my real emotions in gobbledegook, like in In His Own Write. When I wrote teenage poems, I wrote in gobbledegook because I was always hiding my real emotions from Mimi.
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The pressures of being a parent are equal to any pressure on earth. To be a conscious parent, and really look to that little being's mental and physical health, is a responsibility which most of us, including me, avoid most of the time because it's too hard.
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When you wake up and your heart is going like the clappers or your back feels strained, or you develop some other hang-up, you should let your mind go to the pain and the pain itself will regurgitate the memory which originally caused you to suppress it in your body. In this way the pain goes to the right channel instead of being repressed again, as it is if you take a pill or a bath, saying 'Well, I'll get over it'. Most people channel their pain into God or masturbation or some dream of making it.
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My role in society, or any artist's or poet's role, is to try and express what we all feel. Not to tell people how to feel. Not as a preacher, not as a leader, but as a reflection of us all.
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I stopped listening to Dylan with both ears after Highway 64 (sic) and Blonde on Blonde, and even then it was because George Harrison would sit me down and make me listen.
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It just was a gradual development over the years. I mean last year was 'all you need is love.' This year, it's 'all you need is love and peace, baby.' Give peace a chance, and remember Love. The only hope for us is peace. Violence begets violence. You can have peace as soon as you like if we all pull together. You're all geniuses, and you're all beautiful. You don't need anyone to tell you who you are. You are what you are.
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I'd like to incite people to break the framework, to be disobedient in school, to stick their tongues out, to keep insulting authority.
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When I started, rock and roll itself was the basic revolution to people of my age and situation. We needed something loud and clear to break through all the unfeeling and repression that had been coming down on us kids.
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When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down ‘happy’. They told me I didn’t understand the assignment, and I told them they didn’t understand life.
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Whenever in doubt, turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream.
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I keep on reading the Morning Star newspaper to see if there's any hope, but it seems to be in the 19th century; it seems to be written for dropped-out, middle-aged liberals.
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If somebody gives me a joint, I might smoke it, but I don't go after it.
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How can I give love when I don't know what it is I'm giving?
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I've always been politically minded and against the status quo. It's pretty basic when you're brought up, like I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere.
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Happiness Is A Warm Gun not about heroin. A gun magazine was sitting there with a smoking gun on the cover and an article that I never read inside called 'Happiness Is a Warm Gun.' I took it right from there. I took it as the terrible idea of just having shot some animal.