The Beatles Quotes

“Later, when the other Beatles arrived, the crowd in the street had swelled to an estimated twenty-thousand, some of whom were whipped up in a terrific heat. Others, many of them young girls who had been waiting since dawn, suffered from hunger and exhaustion. The police force, which had been monitoring the situation nervously, called in the army and navy to help maintain order, but it was short-lived. By late afternoon, with chants of "We want the Beatles!" ringing through the square, the shaken troops, now four-hundred strong, felt control slipping from their grasp. They didn't know where to look first: at the barricades being crushed, the girls fainting out of sight, the hooligans stomping on the roofs of cars or pushing through their lines. A fourteen-year-old "screamed so hard she burst a blood-vessel in her throat." It was "frightening, chaotic, and rather inhuman," according to a trooper on horseback. There most pressing concern was the hotels plate-glass windows bowing perilously against the violent crush of bodies. They threatened to explode in a cluster of razor-sharp shards at any moment. Ambulances screamed in the distance, preparing for the worst; a detachment of mounted infantry swung into position.”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“where he was on a first-name basis with the pretty, long-legged usherettes who paraded along the aisles.”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“And yet at the center of this vortex was the desire to do something more with it. What or with whom, he wasn’t sure. But he sensed it was only a matter of time until it all came together and he put his own stamp on it. Eight months later, he met John Lennon.”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“That was him," Paul has said of his own opportune discovery of Elvis Presley, "that was the guru we'd been waiting for. The Messiah had arrived.”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“The trouble with government as it is, is that it doesn’t represent the people. It controls them.” Uh-oh, the reporter thought. Topics like these, he knew, were strictly off-limits. But John persisted. “All they seem to want to do”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“There would be babies born to Beatles, to Beatles fans, millions of people who lived their lives to a soundtrack crafted by four Scouse boys who had either grown up or passed along.”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“they were now calling themselves the Beatles.”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“The new repertoire, almost to a song, had lost its collaborative aspect. They were individual efforts—”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“By mid-1966, an astounding eighty-eight Lennon-McCartney songs had been recorded in over 2,900 versions. Gershwin finally had competition.”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography

“The whole process at the “Inny,” as it was known, imitated a grand and long-standing intellectual tradition, and nothing defined it better than the august school motto: No nobis solum set toti mundo nati—You’re born not for yourself but for the whole world.”
― Bob Spitz, The Beatles: The Biography