John Lydon > Quotes

“If you are pissing people off, you know you are doing something right”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

“Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?”
― John Lydon

“Meat isn't murder, it's delicious.”
― John Lydon

“Only the fakes survive.”
― John Lydon

“You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change.”
― John Lydon

“It's a repressive society where you can't be horrible, I'm not horrible, they made me horrible, I'm just honest.”
― John Lydon

“Any kind of history you read is basically the winning side telling you the others were bad.”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

“Anger is an energy. It really bloody is. It’s possibly the most powerful one-liner I’ve ever come up with. When I was writing the Public Image Ltd song ‘Rise’, I didn’t quite realize the emotional impact that it would have on me, or anyone who’s ever heard it since. I wrote it in an almost throwaway fashion, off the top of my head, pretty much when I was about to sing the whole song for the first time, at my then new home in Los Angeles. It’s a tough, spontaneous idea. ‘Rise’ was looking at the context of South Africa under apartheid. I’d be watching these horrendous news reports on CNN, and so lines like ‘They put a hotwire to my head, because of the things I did and said’, are a reference to the torture techniques that the apartheid government was using out there. Insufferable. You’d see these reports on TV and in the papers, and feel that this was a reality that simply couldn’t be changed. So, in the context of ‘Rise’, ‘Anger is an energy’ was an open statement, saying, ‘Don’t view anger negatively, don’t deny it – use it to be creative.’ I combined that with another refrain, ‘May the road rise with you’. When I was growing up, that was a phrase my mum and dad – and half the surrounding neighbourhood, who happened to be Irish also – used to say. ‘May the road rise, and your enemies always be behind you!’ So it’s saying, ‘There’s always hope’, and that you don’t always have to resort to violence to resolve an issue. Anger doesn’t necessarily equate directly to violence. Violence very rarely resolves anything. In South Africa, they eventually found a relatively peaceful way out. Using that supposedly negative energy called anger, it can take just one positive move to change things for the better. When I came to record the song properly, the producer and I were arguing all the time, as we always tend to do, but sometimes the arguing actually helps; it feeds in. When it was released in early 1986, ‘Rise’ then became a total anthem, in a period when the press were saying that I was finished, and there was nowhere left for me to go. Well, there was, and I went there. Anger is an energy. Unstoppable.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“Chaos was my philosophy. Oh, yeah. Have no rules. If people start to build fences around you, break out and do something else. You should never, ever be understood completely. That's like the kiss of death, isn't it? It's a full stop. I don't ever think you should put full stops on thoughts. They change.”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

“There have been conversations here in the United States about why every ex-President opens a library when politicians do not read the books. Hello, America! Kind of explains your politics. For me, reading saved me, it brought me back.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“I'm not very good at handling stupid people. I must admit.”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

“You’re made to feel ugly, and I made ugly beautiful. Just by sheer persistence. Nobody has the right to say that I am ugly, and I will not be a professional victim, you know. Sorry!”
― John Lydon

“Before the Sex Pistols, music was so bloody serious, all run by university graduates. It was all head music devoid of any real intellectualism. There was no deep though in it, merely images pertaining to something mystical, too stupid and absolutely devoid of reality. How on earth were we supposed to relate to that music when we lived in council flats? We had no money, no job, no nothing. So the Pistols projected that anger, that rock-bottom working-class hate.”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

“Disco sucks? You never heard that from me.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“I think national pride leads to nothing but wars and hate”
― John Lydon

“I liked him as a bloke, and I like a lot of their songs. I like “Girls On Film,” and I can’t pretend otherwise. I don’t have hatred for different forms of music, in fact I’ve got a great deal of love and openness to everything done by anybody. Christ, I have to: I’ve got two Alvin Stardust albums.”
― John Lydon, Anger Is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“I never felt Irish. I always felt, ‘I’m English, this is where I come from, and that’s that.’ Because you’d be reminded of that when you went to Ireland: ‘Ye’re not Oirish!’ the locals would say. So it was like, ‘Bloody hell, shot by both sides here.’ I still love that Magazine song – so relevant to me, those lyrics.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“But I don’t call it immigration, I call it migration. As a species it’s very healthy for us to get up and move around the planet. Sometimes certain groups of people have to do that for economic reasons. Nobody’s doing it just to be spiteful. Everybody loves the idea of a homeland. I used to, but I’ve kind of got the bigger picture now. It’s a home planet to me.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“Simon Le Bon spotted me having a problem there, and he went, ‘Don’t you know who he is?’ and that was it, I was in. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, it takes Duran Duran to get Johnny Rotten into a building!’ I liked him as a bloke, and I like a lot of their songs. I like ‘Girls On Film’, and I can’t pretend otherwise.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“I was on the dole for a very short time, for about two weeks. I didn’t want to be lining up in the dole office. I hated that place, didn’t want nothing to do with it. I didn’t feel I belonged there. The two times I turned up, I bitterly resented it and I swore I’d never go back there. I really didn’t like the whole format of it, or the institutionalization it entailed, or the way they make you feel somehow guilty about it all. That’s your right – you’ve worked, or your parents have worked. If the state can’t provide jobs, then what the fuck are you supposed to do? In many ways I completely understand people taking to illegal activities, because frankly there’s no other way to make any kind of money at all, or get yourself out of the dumps. For me, personally, I could never get involved with theft, I can’t do it.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“And then you’ve got a media ready to package that, because it takes away from the political content of them songs. Suddenly there’s not a real serious social message, there’s just a drug addict. I”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“Ich sag’s ihnen in’s gesicht.”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

“Within a year or two, however, a couple of the first things I wrote – ‘Anarchy In The UK’ and ‘God Save The Queen’ – really hit their target. I’d like to thank the British public library system: that was my training ground, that’s where I learned to throw those verbal grenades. I wasn’t just throwing bricks through shop windows as a voice of rebellion, I was throwing words where they really mattered. Words count.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“You’ve got to learn in life, you’ve got to learn it quick and keep it for the rest of your life: pull your own strings, and have no puppetmaster – and – habits – are – puppetmasters.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“All I want in life is clarity, transparency, so I know who is doing what, and to whom, at all times. My only real enemies in life are liars, and they’ll do everything to stop me because they want the contamination to continue, because it’s comfortable for them, or completely ignorant mindless fools who believe every word they read in a daily rag.”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“Well, sod his luck, I’m a lot higher up the ladder of tragedy than him!”
― John Lydon, Anger is an Energy: My Life Uncensored

“It wasn’t overwhelmingly catastrophic he killed himself. Most people who mess about with heroin, they lose their souls way earlier, it’s just waiting for the body to keel over.”
― John Lydon

“You could just be yourself. That was a very important part of the Sex Pistols era. It wasn’t an antisex thing or a consciously premeditated attitude. We weren’t going to play the games according to the previous shitheads.”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

“The fanatics out there take things far too seriously. They’d probably be appalled at the way we view our own material because they see it quite differently. They want us to have their visions and represent their attitudes about our work. Audiences are far too fucking demanding on the people they like and dislike. The truth always lets them down because it destroys their fantasies.”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs

“There’s no master conspiracy in anything, not even in governments. Everything is just some kind of vaguely organized chaos.”
― John Lydon, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs