455 Henry Rollins Quotes:
The month of November makes me feel that life is passing more quickly. In an effort to slow it down, I try to fill the hours more meaningfully.
Henry Rollins
It’s sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.
Henry Rollins
We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.
Henry Rollins
I am on until I am dead, like a light bulb.
Henry Rollins
Keep your blood clean, your body lean, and your mind sharp.
Henry Rollins
I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.
Henry Rollins
Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.
Henry Rollins
I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives; we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn’t go so well.
Henry Rollins
Now, if someone wants to spit on me, I just roll up the window of my BMW 540i.
Henry Rollins
We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer’s wreckage. We will welcome summer’s ghost.
Henry Rollins
I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride.
Henry Rollins
I spend several days at a time without enough sleep. At first, normal activities become annoying. When you are too tired to eat, you really need some sleep. A few days later, things become strange. Loud noises become louder and more startling, familiar sounds become unfamiliar, and life reinvents itself as a surrealist dream.
Henry Rollins
The ecstatic insanity of romantic pursuit can be so enhanced by music that entire romantic conquests, victories and ruinous, crushing defeats can be tied to songs to such a degree that it’s almost unbearable to listen to them again, as they bring back the memories so vividly.
Henry Rollins
I think self-reliance and self-responsibility and self-accountability will help you as a parent, a teacher, as a citizen as a friend.
Henry Rollins
Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on. 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.
Henry Rollins
Humans are pretty crafty but will fold quickly in severe cold.
Henry Rollins
lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light, If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.
Henry Rollins
Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.
Henry Rollins
My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.
Henry Rollins
I just travel the world with my backpack and my cameras and a bunch of Clif bars.
Henry Rollins
Live music is the cure for what ails ya.
Henry Rollins
Voting is completely important. People in America think democracy is a given. I think of it as an ecosystem, and what gets in the way of it is politicians and apathy.
Henry Rollins
Where there is young people and vitality, you’re going to find punk rock.
Henry Rollins
This is my own little rock theory: In my mind, Nirvana slayed the hair bands. They shot the top off the poodles.
Henry Rollins
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.
Henry Rollins
Being unique is never easy, and often, by the time culture catches up with you, there are only a few people who notice.
Henry Rollins
I once asked Ozzy Osbourne, truly one of my favorite people in the world, if he was cool with singing Black Sabbath songs year after year, whether he was performing with Black Sabbath or out on a solo tour. He said it was great.
Henry Rollins
‘Fox News’ will one day come to an end. Led Zeppelin will not. It’s as simple as that.
Henry Rollins
It is amazing to hear grown-up people rationalize homophobia and discrimination. The lengths they go to trying to prove their points take reason to its breaking point.
Henry Rollins
Some people see Black Friday as a much-needed break for their wallet. I see it as retail outlets showing the customers the full weight of their contempt. The frenzy to buy cheap crap from China, the human downgrade of people fighting with each other over items they can probably live without, to me, is an insult.
Henry Rollins
Ruts were a great punk rock band from England whose songs were as excellent as their time together was short.
Henry Rollins
One person’s roar is another’s whine, just as one person’s music is another’s unendurable noise.
Henry Rollins
Act of 1964 was vigorously and vociferously opposed by the Southern states. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law nonetheless.
Henry Rollins
When you start to doubt yourself the real world will eat you alive.
Henry Rollins
Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.
Henry Rollins
I have healthy disagreements with political parties I’m not aligned with, but I don’t think it should be to the point where we’re cursing and trying to strangle each other.
Henry Rollins
‘Duck Dynasty’ is a ridiculous show, and long may it wave. America and democracy will endure. They’ve seen a lot worse.
Henry Rollins
Marriage equality is a term so ridiculous on its face that when you hear it mentioned, you would think you were in Riyadh. Years from now, perhaps we can lose the equality part, the same-sex part and call it what it is – marriage.
Henry Rollins
I always found the Chicago audience to be a smart, fast-moving, violent and cheerful lot, and it’s always good to be back.
Henry Rollins
Before the Civil War, the Southern states were selling a lot of cotton to England and didn’t seem to mind British occupation. By and large, the Revolutionary War wasn’t at all great for business.
Henry Rollins
Don’t do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.
Henry Rollins
Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowed room with boring people than I feel on my own.
Henry Rollins
I’m just a psycho, and the stage is a better place to go than either the loony bin or somewhere else. Henry Rollins Better Place Go Psycho My motto is, ‘Never quit.’
Henry Rollins
Creating problems is easy. We do it all the time. Finding solutions, ones that last and produce good results, requires guts and care.
Henry Rollins
Musicians should not play music. Music should play musicians.
Henry Rollins
I have come to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time to have too much pride in anything. Perhaps it’s good to have a sense of duty, a jealous zeal to protect or improve, but pride ultimately is only that which stands vulnerable to offense and degradation.
Henry Rollins
I don’t think you’ll ever have a perfect world because we humans are prone to error, and so we’re always in search of an upgrade.
Henry Rollins
I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I believe in various degrees of hatred, paranoia, and abandonment. However much of that gets heaped upon you doesn’t matter – it’s only a matter of how much you can take and what it does to you.
Henry Rollins
In winter, I plot and plan. In spring, I move.
Henry Rollins
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.
Henry Rollins
In Israel, there’s a lot to learn from anyone, because to live there you’ve got to deal with the truth. Things happen real fast. Your day goes from cool to catastrophic in one second. Israelis know that the cafe you’re in could blow up, or the shopping mall, and they rock that.
Henry Rollins
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.
Henry Rollins
When a young non-white male is stopped and searched at the whim of a police officer, his idea of personal space, privacy and self esteem are shattered, to say nothing of his Fourth and Fourteenth Amendment protections. The damage goes deep quickly and stays. Stop & frisk, as well as a tactic, is also an incitement.
Henry Rollins
I would like to become a better photographer. I’m working on that.
Henry Rollins
To me, the real ‘state of the union’ is found in how Americans react to current events.
Henry Rollins
Pizza makes me think that anything is possible.
Henry Rollins
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.
Henry Rollins
Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness. Henry
Henry Rollins
I think it’s fantastic when the young enrage their elders. I really do believe that if it’s too loud, you are indeed too old, and that if it has been standing for too long, it needs a thorough inspection.
Henry Rollins
Why do you think the old stories tell of men who set out on great journeys to impress the gods? Because trying to impress people just isn’t worth the time and effort.
Henry Rollins
When someone asks you, ‘What’s punk?’ my reply is, ‘If you have to ask, you’re never going to know.’
Henry Rollins
I’m pessimistic. I don’t think that justice always gets the right person.
Henry Rollins
I am an employment hyena. I am happy to make a meal of what the lions leave behind.
Henry Rollins
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
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.
Henry Rollins
I have been restless for as long as I can remember.
Henry Rollins
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
I’m actually on the Twitter like all those crazy young kids are, and if I’m going to do an in-store appearance or I post something on my website, I tweet these followers, a word I don’t like so much, and over 50,000 people go, like, ‘Okay, I got it.’
Henry Rollins
I’ve never heard Daft Punk; I’ve never heard a track of theirs in my life. They’re the two guys with motorcycle helmets on?
Henry Rollins
I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m willing to bet one of my arms right now that as long as there’s electricity, Ramones music is going to be relevant.
Henry Rollins
I like boring black and white films with subtitles. I’m basically a drip.
Henry Rollins
I’m a big fan of the American Tapes label. But that’s very hard to keep a grip on that because you blink your eyes and they’ve released three records, all of which are limited edition, all sold at one show. So you have to follow in drips and drops on eBay, which I do.
Henry Rollins
Have you ever heard the expression ‘one hot mess?’ I think the term was custom-made for the mayor of Toronto, Rob Ford.
Henry Rollins
I tend to gravitate to the darkest or most obscure part of any venue in an effort to have my own space to experience the music on my own, free from unwanted conversations and other distractions.
Henry Rollins
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
Airports in major cities, like LAX, are trippy environments. It is at once a national and international gathering of those in transition: The euphoric, emerging from planes, their journey at an end, and the determined, about to depart.
Henry Rollins
When you hear about what someone else is going through, and you are unable to distance yourself from it or in any way muzzle your empathy and are inspired to actually do something, these are moments to learn from.
Henry Rollins
One of the most insane environments I have ever spent time in is a gun range. There we are, all in a line, armed to the teeth, firing away.
Henry Rollins
Between the Dinosaur Jr. albums and his recent solo albums, ‘Several Shades of Why’ and ‘Heavy Blanket,’ J Mascis is emerging as one of the last men from all that ’80s indie madness, still writing songs that you want to listen to over and over.
Henry Rollins