Top 100 Henry Rollins Quotes
#1. You can go down the list of great artists and kind of understand that they are products of their environment. Whether it's U2 or Henry Rollins or myself or Johnny Lydon, they're gonna be products of their environment.
Eddie Vedder
#2. There's no rule that you have to like Henry Rollins the musician or the actor.
Henry Rollins
#3. I'd love to talk to Janeane Garafalo or Randi Rhodes or Stephanie Miller from Air America. I'm an Air American junkie; I listen to them every day.
Henry Rollins
#4. Michele Bachmann is always a great person to go to for an opinion about anything. She has a very active and interesting mind.
Henry Rollins
#6. Bands have always written songs against what they see as wrong. Ronald Reagan really made for a lot of songs.
Henry Rollins
#7. I find it takes a lot of strength to endure myself.
Henry Rollins
#9. You'll never know that just sitting across a room full of people, I have transformed you into a goddess. A destroyer of despair.
Henry Rollins
#10. To get a human through a life, lives of broken bones, knock-me-over-with-a-feather susceptibility to myriad viruses, and whatever else might befall someone will cost money.
Henry Rollins
#11. No matter how rough things can be at times, many Americans are optimistic and on the move.
Henry Rollins
#12. I like the idea of someone else's love safely sealed in a song or a book.
Henry Rollins
#13. I'm not interested in censorship. I like the First Amendment very much.
Henry Rollins
#14. Contemporary bands often will do tour-only releases pressed and sold only in Australia. Crikey!
Henry Rollins
#15. Of course same sex marriage is constitutional! The right to be yourself, to pursue life, liberty, and property, is protected several ways over several amendments. John Boehner should know this.
Henry Rollins
#16. I learned that you can get away with a lot of shit if you just do it like it's all you knew how to do.
Henry Rollins
#17. I have found a way to beat myself
I win by losing, something like that
I'm told that I'm stupid
So ok, I'll be stupid
If I can't register the pain
Then it's not there
I'm not so stupid after all
I'll show them
Henry Rollins
#18. I never thought I was right for TV or that TV was right for me.
Henry Rollins
#19. If you are a musician who has released albums, it would perhaps be morbidly interesting to know how much you would be owed if everyone who now has your music had actually bought your record.
Henry Rollins
#20. If the death of Osama Bin Laden brings any peace to those who lost loved ones on that awful day in September 2001, that is a great thing. It is more likely, however, just a painful reminder of what was lost.
Henry Rollins
#21. I do my best to limit the amount of compromise in my life so I have more time to do what I want. Not hanging out with many people really helps. I am not a people person and I spend a great deal of time on my own and in this environment, I get a lot done.
Henry Rollins
#22. It took me until my teenage years to realize that I was medicating with music. I was pushing back against my stupid school uniform, instructors who called me by my last name and my classmates, who, while friendly enough, were not at all inspiring.
Henry Rollins
#23. In the late summer of 1986, the band I had been in for five years stopped playing. Suddenly, I was on my own. This new state of bandlessness was, at first, traumatic. When your group breaks up, a lot of broken parts hit the ground.
Henry Rollins
#24. I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that.
Henry Rollins
#25. If you hate your parents, the man or the establishment, don't show them up by getting wasted and wrapping your car around a tree. If you really want to rebel against your parents, out-learn them, outlive them, and know more than they do.
Henry Rollins
#26. I think in rural settings, people have a different appreciation for animals than might the city dweller. In parts of India where poisonous snake bite is common, people have a much different value system. I live in a city. I'm not thinking about wolves, lions, etc.
Henry Rollins
#27. Try driving the streets of Los Angeles without seeing a billboard depicting a film with a lead actor holding a gun. It's almost as if guns are harmless props used to bring out the cheekbones and jawline of the screen star.
Henry Rollins
#28. In the summer of '84, you just couldn't escape the Born in the USA record.
Henry Rollins
#29. Horror jolts me when I look at one of you and see a pair of beautiful eyes that make me think your mind might contain a world that could hold me as the bolts shake loose and fly from my frame.
Henry Rollins
#30. You need a little bit of insanity to do great things.
Henry Rollins
#32. Americans are poorly served by their media, you know, for the war machine and propaganda machine and the global empire and they're poorly served by what they are being told is representative government.
Henry Rollins
#33. I would like to be able to gently drift in and out of existence when I wanted to.
Henry Rollins
#34. To our enemies all over the world who plan America's demise, please take my advice. Give up now. No matter what, you will lose. You will lose it all.
Henry Rollins
#35. America has 2.2 million of it's citizens incarcerated. It's a statistic we should be ashamed of ...
Henry Rollins
#36. I work pretty much every day. I can't really separate it from life, so I guess the work is my life.
Henry Rollins
#37. Quite often governments are one way and the people are another.
Henry Rollins
#38. Half of life is fucking up, the other half is dealing with it.
Henry Rollins
#39. I'm most in my element on tour, with a gig that day, like today. I'm on the road where I am supposed to be. I will be where I'm supposed to be at nighttime, on stage, in front of people, doing my thing.
Henry Rollins
#40. Don't hide behind the Constitution or the Bible. If you're against gay marriage, just be honest, put a scarlet 'H' on your shirt, and say, 'I am a homophobe!
Henry Rollins
#41. My love is a thousand French poets puking black blood on your Cure CD collection.
Henry Rollins
#42. This sounds really corny, but I am a slave to my work, a workaholic, and glad of it. I like what I do; this is my place, my little universe, one of them.
Henry Rollins
#44. Imagine a 15-year-old kid saying, 'I have two moms - it's cool.' I don't fear that at all.
Henry Rollins
#45. When I am in Africa, I realize I don't know much, have not seen much, and there's a lot to be done.
Henry Rollins
#46. Nothing brings people together more than mutual hatred.
Henry Rollins
#47. I'm usually busy - if you call me at the house, I get about four phone calls there a year - I'm usually running around the house with a pen in my mouth holding onto something, folding it, or doing something to it, and it's always a bad time.
Henry Rollins
#48. Disappointment always arrives before hope and the darkness of night comes before the dawn. Don't lose hope now because things will brighter with the new day.
Henry Rollins
#49. I do think that Americans are poorly served by their media, at times extremely poorly served by their elected officials who are non responsive to majority feelings and cut off to a certain degree from the affairs of the world.
Henry Rollins
#50. Sarah Palin embarrasses herself almost immediately upon opening her mouth to speak or upon moving her fingers to send messages to her dull flock.
Henry Rollins
#51. Kids need parents who love and support them unconditionally, full stop.
Henry Rollins
#52. Keep me preoccupied Keep me busy, busy, busy So I won't have to think I don't want to think Because it only brings me pain I just keep running away from My problems Keep me busy Give me a million things to do So I can keep running away from myself.
Henry Rollins
#53. I'm a liar. I'll rip your mind up. I'll burn your soul, I'll turn you in to me.
Henry Rollins
#55. George Zimmerman is a foot soldier in a rapidly privatizing country. He is a new centurion of 21st-century America. Law enforcement is tied down by the strictures of, well, the law. There is only 'so much they can do' to take care of the 'problem.'
Henry Rollins
#56. When I write lyrics, it's only when I'm angry or hurt or sad. So lyrically it's never really easy going. And the music is always really intense.
Henry Rollins
#57. It's hard to keep your backbone straight in America. It's easy to turn into that which you hate, and to get smashed.
Henry Rollins
#58. Anyone who wants to help me doesn't. Anyone who wants to kill me might. Anyone who wants to love me better not.
Henry Rollins
#59. I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don't have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it's pretty insane as it is.
Henry Rollins
#60. Nothing moves me more than the history of the United States.
Henry Rollins
#61. Look, it's a monster. He's walking alone. Look, he's pulling something out of his pocket. He threw it on the ground. Let's go see what it is. It's a black box. You open it ... ok ... Look, it's sorrow, misery and pain. It's loneliness and longing. Boy, he'll be sorry he lost these.
Henry Rollins
#62. Citizens United didn't work. Hey, Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Shellgame Adelson: Democracy trumps money sometimes.
Henry Rollins
#63. I could fall in love with a cruel desert that kills without passion, a canyon full of scorpions, one thousand blinding arctic storms, a century sealed in a cave, a river of molten salt flowing down my throat. But never with you.
Henry Rollins
#64. I'm disappointed by bands left and right, every day.
Henry Rollins
#65. I have heard people say that they felt closer to their parents after they have died. Maybe if I treat people as if they were dead, I could get along with them better
Henry Rollins
#66. I don't get a rush from anything. I did music as hard as I could. Acting for me at least, is a far more restrained performance than music. It requires a lot of skill and discipline. I'm not any good at it but I enjoy trying to be good at it.
Henry Rollins
#67. A country that has been through as much as Vietnam has to have some crazy music somewhere.
Henry Rollins
#68. I can't remember that I ever had just a minute of stage fright.
Henry Rollins
#69. I'm packed with broken glass and memories and it all hurts.
Henry Rollins
#70. The Bad Seeds are a band I will travel a great distance to see whenever possible.
Henry Rollins
#71. The arts in America exist in spite of America, not because of America.
Henry Rollins
#73. What if Americans were all judged by the actions of the Bush administration and people did not know the truth? That America is full of people who are, at present, poorly represented and poorly catered to by the media.
Henry Rollins
#74. An appreciation of animals is good for a human, it can lead to a better understanding and respect for all living things.
Henry Rollins
#75. I can't imagine being sixty years of age and playing music I wrote when I was in my twenties. I would rather sail the sea of consequence to new lands. Laps around the shallow end of the pool, not for me.
Henry Rollins
#76. She lit my soul and inhaled deeply
Flicking my ashes occasionally.
Henry Rollins
#77. The first several years of my life were used to upload incredible amounts of fear, and I just became afraid of everything. I was afraid of my parents, afraid of my classmates, afraid of the streets of Washington, D.C. I would flinch at every gesture.
Henry Rollins
#78. If i was a woman these days, i'd be killing motherfuckers. my handgun would never cool and my hands would be covered in testicular blood. i would have a horrible reputation with a lot of men because i would be calling them on their weak bullshit left and right.
Henry Rollins
#79. Where there is young people and vitality, you're going to find punk rock.
Henry Rollins
#80. As the middle class is predated upon with an ever greater malicious intensity, their children stand to lose more and harder than their parents ever did.
Henry Rollins
#81. What I don't want to do is go out there and not be able to mean it, you know?
Henry Rollins
#82. I don't need to have my convictions confirmed by a show of numbers. However, being among people in front of a band leads me to believe that all is not lost, that humans, now and then, can communicate on a higher level than the political and the practical.
Henry Rollins
#83. For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.
Henry Rollins
#84. I come from a town of great musicians: Washington, D.C. It's no joke, that history.
Henry Rollins
#85. It is only our humanity that can deliver us from the brutality of our achievements.
Henry Rollins
#86. Keep walking. Hot night right now, right here. All you have is what you are. All you want is much too much. All you get is so much less. All you feel is nothing. All you see is darkness. All you know is senseless and all you can do about it is ride.
Henry Rollins
#87. The reality is that we are going to have problems with water in this century. And the fact that we are going to have problems with fossil fuel is a given.
Henry Rollins
#88. The scarcity of the music not only makes the music itself enjoyable but it also gives the collector a strange sense of superiority.
Henry Rollins
#89. I have been curious about Haiti for many years. The history of the country is as fascinating as it is turbulent.
Henry Rollins
#90. Basically, men are afraid of women and can't handle the fact that they came out of the same thing they spend the rest of their lives trying to get back into.
Henry Rollins
#91. I am not immune to the lure of a signed record, flier or set list. The fact that your music heroes potentially had, in their own hands, the record you now have in yours is kind of cool. When the musician has departed, it can give the thing a unique power.
Henry Rollins
#93. So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn't really give them the idea of the world. Or they don't read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself.
Henry Rollins
#94. More guns equaling more safety is a slippery slope, and what makes it so is human blood.
Henry Rollins
#95. I travel because I want to know. Books and documentaries will only get you so far. If you want to know, you will have to go.
Henry Rollins
#96. I think that America certainly has racism, I think that any industrialized country does. But when you see how many million fans Barack Obama has who are not black, it would lead one to the conclusion that millions of Americans are in fact not burdened by the albatross of racism.
Henry Rollins
#97. I just travel the world with my backpack and my cameras and a bunch of Clif bars.
Henry Rollins
#98. Books are cool, but knowledge without mileage doesn't mean anything to me.
Henry Rollins
#99. From those who agonize that they may no longer be able to write off their private jet to someone who doesn't feel like making the three mile hike to the well to get water and carry it back, everyone struggles.
Henry Rollins
#100. I have found the Iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But two hundred pounds is always two hundred pounds
Henry Rollins
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