The dream is over. It's just the same, only I'm thirty, and a lot of people have got long hair

I don't know about the "history"; the people who are in control and in power, and the class system and the whole bullshit bourgeoisie is exactly the same, except there is a lot of fag middle class kids with long, long hair walking around London in trendy clothes, and Kenneth Tynan is making a fortune out of the word "fuck." Apart from that, nothing happened. We all dressed up, the same bastards are in control, the same people are runnin' everything. It is exactly the same.

We've grown up a little, all of us, there has been a change and we're all a bit freer and all that, but it's the same game. Shit, they're doing exactly the same thing, selling arms to South Africa, killing blacks on the street, people are living in fucking poverty, with rats crawling over them. It just makes you puke, and I woke up to that too.

The dream is over. It's just the same, only I'm thirty, and a lot of people have got long hair. That's what it is, man, nothing happened except that we grew up, we did our thing – just like they were telling us. You kids – most of the so called "now generation" are getting a job. We're a minority, you know, people like us always were, but maybe we are a slightly larger minority because of maybe something or other.

John Lennon, Interview with J.S. Wenner, Rolling Stone (Feb 4 1971), quoted in D. Sandbrook, Never had it so good (2005), xxiii.