Quote Of The Day By George Harrison: 'With What Was Going On, With Presidents Getting Assassinated ...'

George Harrison was the junior partner of the Beatles on account of being the youngest — though Ringo Starr joined last, he was the oldest — and Harrison was overshadowed as a songwriter during the band's existence by the dominant partnership of John Lennon and Paul McCartney. He was often characterized as the "quiet Beatle," but this was, reportedly, far from the truth.

Born in Liverpool, England, on February 25, 1943, Harrison was invited to join Lennon's pre-Beatles band the Quarrymen after making the acquaintance of McCartney, who was already in the group. The band went through various line-ups before emerging as the Beatles, who performed extensively in the U.K. and Germany before rising to international fame. Their appearance on "The Ed Sullivan Show" in 1964 broke the band wide in America, turning them into a phenomenon amid the craze known as Beatlemania.

As a band, they were among the most recognizable people on the planet during the 1960s. But while the decade is often fondly remembered for its counterculture movement, Flower Power, and psychedelia — all aspects that the Fab Four were a prominent part of — it was also a period of huge political upheaval and could be dangerous for those in the spotlight ... as our Quote of the Day from Harrison shows.

"With what was going on, with presidents getting assassinated, the whole magnitude of our fame made me nervous."

Our Quote of the Day comes from an interview George Harrison gave to Rolling Stone in 1987, quoted in a profile of the guitarist in 2011. The line is given in the context of Harrison looking back on the '60s and his place in the most pivotal band of the era.

Around the time of the interview, Harrison was in his mid-40s, though he was hitting one of the commercial peaks of his career with the release of the chart-topping single "Got My Mind Set on You" and its critically acclaimed parent album, "Cloud Nine." Harrison was notably keen for the end of the Beatles in 1970, which allowed him to pursue his own songwriting after years of struggling to get his work onto the band's albums. But "Cloud Nine" also features "When We Was Fab," which sees the guitarist looking back on the Fab Four era fondly.

Though Harrison enjoyed a nostalgic turn in 1987, he remained conscious of the realities and dark political landscape that lay behind the dream of the 1960s counterculture. Indeed, the Beatles' rise to fame coincided with seismic world events such as the shocking 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and the band was at the height of its fame during the assassinations of other prominent figures of the decade, such as the civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968.

It is little wonder, then, that George Harrison felt on edge due to the potential dangers of life spent in the spotlight. He and his bandmates weren't actively involved in politics, but they broke the mold of most rock stars to that point in being open about what they thought about society, and sometimes offended people as a result. John Lennon's notorious observation in a 1966 interview that the Beatles were "bigger than Jesus" drew an enormous backlash against the band in the United States, with widespread demonstrations including those by the white-supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan. During one show in Memphis, Tennessee, someone in the stadium set off firecrackers, which the Beatles, who were onstage at the time, feared was the sound of gunshots.

Tragically, Harrison's worries proved to be entirely justified. His bandmate, John Lennon — whom Harrison reportedly looked up to in his early years and craved the acceptance of — was assassinated in December 1980 at the age of 40, by a man who had asked for his autograph earlier the same day. And in 1999, Harrison himself was brutally attacked by an intruder who had broken into his home, and suffered extensive stab wounds that his son, Dhani, says shortened his lifespan, with the guitarist dying of cancer just two years later.

"We all gave as much as we could. The thing was, Paul and John wrote all the songs in the beginning. And they did write great songs, which made it more difficult to break in or get some action on the songwriting thing. But you know, we all did contribute such a lot to the Beatles. There was a period of time when people thought, 'Ringo doesn't play the drums.' I don't know what they thought of me, but they tended to think it was John and Paul for a period of time."

"I think some of the best stuff we did was when we stopped touring and spent a lot of time in the studio. You know, we lived in a studio, really. A lot of things which were innovations as far as recording went — I think that was some of the best music. But as far as playing live, I agree with what John says about the old days. We were really rocking. We had fun, you know. We really had fun."

"Ringo is like myself with the guitar. I don't play it that often. I don't practice. Ringo may not play the drums from one year to the next, but when he picks up his sticks and gets his drum skins tightened right, he'll just rock and play just like he played in the old days."

"That's the whole thing why people have missed God. They haven't been able to see God because he is hidden in themselves. All the time people concentrate their energies and activities outwards on this surface level that we live on. But it's only by turning your concentration and directing it inwardly, in a form of meditation, that you can see your own god in there."