In defense of Yoko

Now before everyone gets all up in arms about this, calm down peoples. I am entitled to my opinion. John Lennon, himself, admits that he used to be selfish and have anger problems and abuse women physically and emotionally. And then he met Yoko. And he grew and changed and was about love and peace. He wrote his best songs when he was with Yoko (Imagine anyone???). He made his most radical, important statements when he was with her. He couldn't write and sing songs about holding hands and twisting and shouting forever. He had to move on. He had to grow. He had to become the person he was always destined to be. He considered her like one of his limbs and grew to think that if she was apart from him, he felt incomplete. People can grow and change together. The general public always showed such a repulsion towards her because John left The Beatles. But it was time. The Beatles needed to end when they did. Things end when they are supposed to. And sometimes start again. They just wanted to be in love and do their thing. And people tearing down something like they had, is exactly what John Lennon was against. It was just love. For all its worth, in an all consuming nature, which is OK for people sometimes. In their case it was. If she was good enough for John, she's good enough for me! I have this photo hanging up in my room because they almost started to look alike after a while. They became one. A whole. It's up to remind me that there are all types of love out in the world. Mind blowing, life changing, inspirational love.

John Lennon's thoughts about Yoko:

"As usual, there is a great woman behind every idiot.”

“It wasn’t that she inspired the songs. She inspired me.”

"It takes time to get rid of all this garbage that I've been carrying around that was influencing the way I thought and the way I lived. It had a lot to do with Yoko, showing me that I was still possessed. I left physically when I fell in love with Yoko, but mentally it took the last ten years of struggling. I learned everything from her. ... It is a teacher-pupil relationship. That's what people don't understand. She's the teacher and I'm the pupil. I'm the famous one, the one who's supposed to know everything, but she's my teacher. She's taught me everything I f*cking know."

"We are both sensitive people and we were hurt a lot by it. I mean, we couldn't understand it. When you're in love, when somebody says something like, 'How can you be with that woman?' you say, 'What do you mean? I am with this goddess of love, the fulfilment of my whole life. Why are you saying this? Why do you want to throw a rock at her or punish me for being in love with her?' Our love helped us survive it, but some of it was pretty violent. There were a few times when we nearly went under, but we managed to survive it and here we are. [John looks up] Thank you, thank you, thank you."

"We haven't been apart for more than one hour in two years. Everything we do is together, and that's what gives us our strength."

"She's brought out the real me. And I get nervous and tense like anybody else but I'm more relaxed than I ever was, since I was a child, you know."

"Anybody who knows our history knows that we went through all hell together - through miscarriages and terrible times."

"I'd never met a woman I considered as intelligent as me. That sounds bigheaded, but every woman I met was either a dolly-chick, or a sort of screwed-up intellectual chick. And of course, in the field I was in, I didn't meet many intellectual people anyway. I always had this dream of meeting an artist, an artist girl who would be like me. And I thought it was a myth, but then I met Yoko and that was it."

"We've broken down a few barriers between us, which we had to do because we had two big egos. Two individual artists - and with love we overcame that."

"Before Yoko and I met, we were half a person. You know there's an old myth about people being half and the other half being in the sky, or in heaven or on the other side of the universe or a mirror image. But we are two halves, and together we're a whole."

"John and Yoko are like the wind. You can't see it, but when it passes the trees bend. You know, and that's what we do."

"That's part of our policy, is not to be taken seriously, because I think our opposition, whoever they may be, in all their manifest forms, don't know how to handle humor. You know, and we are humorous, we are, what are they, Laurel and Hardy. That's John and Yoko, and we stand a better chance under that guise, because all the serious people, like Martin Luther King, and Kennedy, and Gandhi, got shot."

"I've had the boyhood thing of being Elvis. Now I want to be with my best friend, and my best friend's my wife. Who could ask for anything more?"

"I'd like to live to a ripe old age, with Yoko only, you know. And I'm not afraid of dying. I don't know how it'd feel at the moment. But I'm prepared for death because I don't believe in it. I think it's just getting out of one car and getting into another."

"When [Yoko and I] got back together, we decided that this is our life. That having a baby was important to us, and that everything else was subsidiary to that, and therefore everything else had to be abandoned. I mean, abandonment gave us the fulfillment we were looking for and the space to breathe."

"I used to be cruel to my woman, and physically -- any woman. I was a hitter. I couldn't express myself and I hit. I fought men and I hit women. That is why I am always on about peace, you see. It is the most violent people who go for love and peace."

Everything's the opposite. But I sincerely believe in love and peace. I am a violent man who has learned not to be violent and regrets his violence. I will have to be a lot older before I can face in public how I treated women as a youngster”

"Why don't people believe us when we say we're simply in love?"