"One thing you can't hide - is when you're crippled inside."

"You have to be a bastard to make it, and that's a fact. And the Beatles are the biggest bastards on earth."

"He didn't come out of my belly, but my God, I've made his bones, because I've attended to every meal, and how he sleeps, and the fact that he swims like a fish because I took him to the ocean. I'm so proud of all those things. But he is my biggest pride."

"Our society is run by insane people for insane objectives. I think we're being run by maniacs for maniacal ends and I think I'm liable to be put away as insane for expressing that. That's what's insane about it."

"Will the people in the cheaper seats clap your hands? And the rest of you, if you'll just rattle your jewelry."

"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."

"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."

"I don't believe in killing whatever the reason!"

"I get by with a little help from my friends."

"You, you may say I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one."

"I believe in everything until it's disproved. So I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it's in your mind. Who's to say that dreams and nightmares aren't as real as the here and now?"

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

"Imagine there's no countriesIt isn't hard to doNothing to kill or die forAnd no religion tooImagine all the peopleLiving life in peaceYou may say that I'm a dreamerBut I'm not the only oneI hope someday you'll join usAnd the world will be as one."

"Love is the flower you've got to let grow."

"Reality leaves a lot to the imagination."

"You either get tired fighting for peace, or you die."

"When you do something noble and beautiful and nobody noticed, do not be sad. For the sun every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps."

"Well, I don't want to be king, I want to be real."

"The more real you get the more unreal the world gets."

"I was feeling insecure you might not love me anymore."

"Nothing is real."

"It was like being in the eye of a hurricane. You'd wake up in a concert and think, Wow, how did I get here?"

"I don't know which will go first - rock 'n' roll or Christianity."

"Music is everybody's possession. It's only publishers who think that people own it."

"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."

"It doesn't matter how long my hair is or what colour my skin is or whether I'm a woman or a man."

"Guilt for being rich, and guilt thinking that perhaps love and peace isn't enough and you have to go and get shot or something."

"They keep you doped with religion, and sex, and T.V.And you think you're so clever and classless and freeBut you're still fucking peasants as far as I can see."

"I'm not afraid of death because I don't believe in it.It's just getting out of one car, and into another."

"The cross of the Legion of Honor has been conferred on me. However, few escape that distinction."

"And so this is Christmas...what have you done?"

"Being honest may not get you a lot of friends it'll get you the right ones."

"If someone thinks that love and peace is a cliche that must have been left behind in the Sixties, that's his problem. Love and peace are eternal."

"Produce your own dream. If you want to save Peru, go save Peru. It's quite possible to do anything, but not if you put it on the leaders and the parking meters. Don't expect Carter or Reagan or John Lennon or Yoko Ono or Bob Dylan or Jesus Christ to come and do it for you. You have to do it yourself."

"God is a concept by which we measure our pain."

"It doesn't matter who you love, where you love, why you love, when you love or how you love, it only matters that you love!"

"There's nowhere you can be that isn't where you're meant to be..."

"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."

"I was the walrus, but now I am John...and so my friends, you'll just have to carry on. The dream is over."

"If being an egomaniac means I believe in what I do and in my art or music, then in that respect you can call me that... I believe in what I do, and I'll say it."

"I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence."

"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."

"War is over ... If you want it."

"Creativity is a gift. It doesn't come through if the air is cluttered."

"Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted."

"Possession isn't nine-tenths of the law. It's nine-tenths of the problem."

"I believe time wounds all heels."

"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."

"Life is what happens while you are busy making other plans."