John Lennon

If everyone demanded peace instead of another television set, then there’d be peace.

I resent performing for frisking idiots who don’t know anything.

We were all on this ship in the sixties, our generation, a ship going to discover the New World. And the Beatles were in the crow’s nest of that ship.

Lots of people who complained about us receiving the MBE received theirs for heroism in the war –for killing people. We received ours for entertaining other people. I’d say we deserve ours more.

We’ve been on our peace gig, as we call it, for a year solid. And people say, ‘Do you think it’s having any effect?’ I can’t answer that. It’s like asking me in the Cavern, ‘Are you gonna make it?’ In the back of my mind I thought, I’m gonna make it, but I couldn’t lay it on the line. And I think that peace is more tangible than Beatles.

The postman wants an autograph. The cab driver wants a picture. The waitress wants a handshake. Everyone wants a piece of you.

A follower of the way has neither form nor shape, neither root nor trunk; nor dwelling place; like a fish leaping in the water.

You believe in a book that has talking animals, wizards, witches, demons, sticks turning into snakes, burning bushes, food falling from the sky, people walking on water, and all sorts of magical, absurd and primitive stories, and you say that we are the ones that need help?

To know God better is only to realize how impossible it is that we should ever know him at all. I know not which is more childish to deny him, or define him.

Live happily in the present moment. It is the only moment we have.

It’s all God’s will: you can die in your sleep, and God can spare you in battle.

All that we are is the result of what we have thought.

Christ was only crucified once and for a few hours. Think of the hundreds of thousands whom Christ has been crucifying in a quiet way ever since.

Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.

Learning Zen is a phenomenon of gold & dung. Before you learn it, it’s like gold; after you learn it, it’s like dung.

The Christian ethic played an essential part in my upbringing.

I have a habit of running from the things I’ve prayed for and then asking God to send them again.

I take the kids to church and Sunday school. They love it. I really think it’s important for a child to feel that there are things that are bigger than your life out there.

It was the schoolboy who said, Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.

I once wanted to become an atheist, but I gave up – they have no holidays.

It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.