Words matter. These are the best Henry Rollins Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
More and more, journalism seems to have hopped out of Truth’s pocket and crept into another.
For the last 30-plus years, I have been doing one long, uninterrupted improv.
I think it is incumbent on anyone who can to lift human dignity to the highest possible levels, maintaining one’s own and helping to raise that of others.
The kid who throws his spaghetti from the high chair onto his father’s face, he’s pushing back. He’s sticking it to the man as he sees it. I like that. So that is punk.
Everything I do, writing, touring, travelling, it all comes from the punk and hardcore attitude, from that expression – from being open to try things but relying on yourself, taking what you have into the battle and making of it what you will, hoping you can figure it out as you go. Make some sense of it.
Trayvon Martin did not need to die.
Change is hard, but change is good.
All my big heroes are literary, writers.
I guess, topic to topic, you could consider me a left-leaning person.
Nothing moves me more than the history of the United States.
To combat the confusion and depression that assault me when I come off the road in the middle of a tour, I seek the most oblivionated music possible. When it’s the ‘way out there’ that I seek, I go right to my stash of amazing music from Japan.
I am on until I am dead, like a light bulb.
After I left D.C. to join Black Flag, I felt I was in a band.
Rock n’ roll unchained a nation and revolutionized radio and the record industry, not to mention the motion picture business.
To me, the real ‘state of the union’ is found in how Americans react to current events.
I think more airtime should be given to Donald Trump and Orly Taitz. They should run for office together. They should open for Charlie Sheen.
Pizza makes me think that anything is possible.
You want to meet a bunch of really friendly people? Go to a Slayer concert. There’ll be some real psychos there, but most of those people will take care of each other.
I get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that’s how I get it out – with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it’s always kind of a wail.
Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.
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.
In my bright, utopian future world, they will hand out college educations like cups of water at the end of the L.A. Marathon.
I was very lucky to have had the opportunity to tour with the Beastie Boys and watched almost every set they played on all those dates. Why not? You do your set and then you get to see the Beasties play? Best deal in town.
Please don’t think that I am one of those squishy types who can’t handle reality. I have plenty of real-world things to deal with all the time. I have deadlines, meetings, I answer the phone, I get turned down, I wait in lines and am forced to pass for normal all the time.
Watching a documentary with people hacking their way through some polar wasteland is merely a visual. Actually trying to deal with cold that can literally kill you is quite a different thing.
For many years, I tried to make New Year’s resolutions. I made lists and shot for great heights: I would show altruism and exert moral strength, patience and all those other great attributes.
I never had any interest in being involved with the Boy Scouts.
Nothing brings people together more, then mutual hatred.
There are records that, in my opinion, only reach their full potential when the listener is disoriented.
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.
People like Jefferson, Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony and M. L. K. are larger than life to me. I find myself staring at photographs of Lincoln almost in disbelief that he was a man who walked the earth and not merely some fiction writer’s creation.
For many, an album is no longer a considerable feat of an artist but just sounds to be half-listened to while one is halfheartedly engaged in something else.
America’s foreign policy lacks the backbone to do the right thing in Afghanistan – which is leave.
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.
Let’s pretend my career in music is a bell. Whether you like my music or not is up to you. But you’ve got to admit I rang that bell pretty hard and pretty often.
You can pass all the gun legislation you want. None of it will make me feel any more or less safe than I do right at this moment.
To hate is to show you still care, who needs that, focus on what’s really important.
Each year, every city in the world that can should have a multiday festival. More people meeting each other, digging new types of music, new foods, new ideas. You want to stop having so many wars? This could be a step in the right direction.
August brings into sharp focus and a furious boil everything I’ve been listening to in the late spring and summer.
Creating problems is easy. We do it all the time. Finding solutions, ones that last and produce good results, requires guts and care.
I think more tolerance, more people having more access to a chance to be literate, and a chance to stay healthy makes for a more peaceful planet.
Now and then, someone is able to look at an empty space, conclude it would be a great place to start a revolution, and bravely go forward.
When I see the hatred exacted at Mr. Obama – you know, he lowered your taxes, killed your number one bad guy and got your guys out of Iraq – I don’t understand why he seems to inflame people so much. You know, unless, unless there’s a race problem.
Anything in this culture that stands still long enough eventually becomes okay if a person can derive an income from it. Eventually, pay-per-view public execution will happen, and it will be half-time entertainment.
You need a little bit of insanity to do great things.
Amy Winehouse was not a person I ever met, and I can’t say that I am overly conversant in all of her music. I do have her albums, and years ago, when I first heard her sing, I thought she was extraordinary. The tone of her voice, her phrasing, her raw appearance – these qualities were extremely captivating to me.
When you’re kept out of the adult world, it’s a blessing in disguise.
I love capitalism. It rewards me for being brave – it awards me for being innovative and thinking out of the box.
Keep your blood clean, your body lean, and your mind sharp.
To me, getting muscular was the first thing I ever achieved by working at it, and it was a game changer for me, because it was the first time I ever had confidence.
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.
Florida is a crazy place, and I have played some of the wildest shows of my life here.
In my many trips to South Africa, I have met and spoken to a lot of people there, and they all seem to find apartheid as repellent as you would.
If you want to believe that humans walked with dinosaurs and the planet is a few thousand years old, that is absolutely fine with me. If you want to teach this to your kids, I don’t care. If states want to teach creationism in their schools, there is nothing I can do about it, so I don’t sweat it.
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.
If I were a doctor, I would prescribe that you addict yourself deeply and irrevocably to music and never, ever seek cure outside of more music. It really is the best drug available.
Ramones music has a Pavlovian effect on me – the song starts, and the world blurs around the sound.
My first introduction to African music was by my mother, who bought the ‘Pata Pata’ album by the great Miriam Makeba when it came out. Now that is an album. What a voice.
Kids need parents who love and support them unconditionally, full stop.
Early spring is the time for vigorous change, a preparation for the heat-driven oppression that is to come.
I take the work seriously, just not myself in it.
Lou Reed’s music has been in the lives of millions of people all over the world for decades. He had a truly universal presence and was respected by musicians across all genres.
‘Duck Dynasty’ is a ridiculous show, and long may it wave. America and democracy will endure. They’ve seen a lot worse.
As a young person, I was on the road playing music, so I was getting new environments shoved in my face whether I wanted them or not.
