John Lennon Quotations | Page 5

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.

Once the new power has taken over they have to establish a new status quo just to keep the factories and trains running.

I've been reading [Nikita] Khrushchev Remembers. I know he's a bit of a lad himself - but he seemed to think that making a religion out of an individual was bad; that doesn't seem to be part of the basic Communist idea. Still people are people, that's the difficulty.

After The Beatles came on the scene everyone started putting on a Liverpudlian accent.

You'd have to give people free rein to attack the local councils or to destroy the school authorities, like the students who break up the repression in the universities. It's already happening, though people have got to get together more.

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.

We went to America a few times and [Brian] Epstein always tried to waffle on at us about saying nothing about Vietnam. So there came a time when George [Harrison] and I said 'Listen, when they ask next time, we're going to say we don't like that war and we think they should get right out.' That's what we did.

I must say the more interesting songs to me were the black ones because they were more simple.

I felt an obligation even then to write a song that people would sing in the pub or on a demonstration. That is why I would like to compose songs for the revolution.

The second political thing I did was to say 'The Beatles are bigger than Jesus.' That really broke the scene, I nearly got shot in America for that. It was a big trauma for all the kids that were following us.