In this post, you will find great Henry Rollins Quotes. You can learn and implement many lessons from these quotes.
When you’re holding people’s attention, I feel you must give them high-quality ingredients. They deserve nothing but your best. And if they need information, get it, cross-check it, and try to be right. Do not waste their time; do not enjoy the ego trip of being onstage.
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.
Sleep is for squares.
The fact is, in the minds of many, Trayvon Martin received the appropriate punishment for a true crime: He was black, male and dared to walk outside. In life, young Trayvon was just a teenager; in death, he has been transformed into a scary, lurking, suspicious, prone-to-violence spook.
When I am in Africa, I always have the feeling that it’s where everything started. When I am in New York, I know it is where everything ended up.
Dinosaur Jr. in their live capacity are a band that put me in a state of such overwhelming rock that it often takes quite a while to come down.
I think the U.K. is an amazing place and has been extremely good to me. Some of my favorite and most-listened-to bands are from England. I have met many good people there and have been in front of some of the most loyal audiences I have ever encountered.
When you’re going into an employment environment that looks pretty scary, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency, your sense of civility and your sense of community.
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.
I am on until I am dead, like a light bulb.
As a young person growing up in Washington, D.C., summers were hot, humid and relentless. My friends and I grew more restless and adventurous with every passing year.
I want to change things for the better, just like everybody else.
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.
I think politicians get hamstrung by the nature of politics when the private sector can really do great things.
My unconditional sure thing is that I don’t have one.
The first Van Halen album makes Johnny Rotten out to be what he really was and still is: a hairdresser.
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.
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.
I love capitalism. It rewards me for being brave – it awards me for being innovative and thinking out of the box.
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.
Early spring is the time for vigorous change, a preparation for the heat-driven oppression that is to come.
If American forces leave Afghanistan, the Taliban is going to do what to America? Don’t say you’re worried about what they will do to the Afghan people. If that was America’s concern, America’s operational presence there would be much different.
More than 30 years ago, in Washington, D.C., I secured a copy of a single by a Los Angeles band called The Bags. The two-song 7-inch, released on Dangerhouse, had a girl on the cover who looked right at you with huge eyes. The songs, ‘Survive‘ and ‘Babylonian Gorgon,’ were great and made many of my mix tapes.
Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two great American institutions.
If the Constitution was a movie, the Preamble would be the trailer, the First Amendment the establishing shot, the 13th the crowd pleaser and the 14th the ultimate hero scene.
Someone like Ashlee Simpson, she lip-synchs on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ gets totally called out la Milli Vanilli, and no one really cares that much. It doesn’t make me hate Ashlee; she’s just taking instructions.
In the city of Pyongyang, you don’t have to look very far to see an image of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung. They love the guy. He is responsible for the wonder that is North Korea.
If you think about it, every single species is endangered. Homo sapiens at the front of the line, mosquitoes and lawyers at the back.
When I think of Mick Jagger still singing that he can’t get any satisfaction in over forty years of being in the Rolling Stones, I have to conclude that he’s either lying or not all that bright.
For a long time, when I was very young, I went to go see arena rock bands. I was 16, and it was all I could get in to see, legally. And I saw Led Zeppelin and Ted Nugent and Van Halen and all that.
At times, I feel America is something that I can actually put my arms around, more than a land mass and a Constitution, something far more containable and understandable. I don’t exactly know what it is, but at these times I feel completely woven into it.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was vigorously and vociferously opposed by the Southern states. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law nonetheless.
If you paid Americans a living wage, they would be able to pay for products made by Americans in America.
What does New York sound like? For me, the Charlie Parker at the Royal Roost recordings on the Savoy label are the total embodiment of the New York music experience.
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.
If the Constitution was a movie, the Preamble would be the trailer, the First Amendment the establishing shot, the 13th the crowd pleaser and the 14th the ultimate hero scene.
It’s easy for me to play bad guys because it’s a very linear acting. Bad guys aren’t empathetic. Being a bad guy is great because you’re not friendly and you don’t have to do much with your face.
Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.
I’m not exactly ambitious as much as I have a very good realization of what I am and what I am capable of.
Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.
I’m 36 and if I met a woman of my own age and married her, I’d also be marrying her former life, her past. It might be OK for some people – I don’t want to judge it or anything – but it’s not for me. It would destroy my creativity.
Most poets are elitist dregs more concerned with proving their skill with a dictionary than communicating ideas with impact.
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.
You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like.
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.
Chris Christie is New Jersey‘s concern, not America’s.
I’m not a very good writer. I’m working at it.
Think about it: No matter who you are, the past plays a large part in your life. I am all about living in the present as best as I can. Try as I might, there is only so much I am able to achieve on this front.
I want to learn more about the world. It makes me want to get up and go.
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.
You can’t get your head around something if you’re yelling.
The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he’s a criminal instead of a scholar. It’s business.
I don’t believe it mattered to Timothy McVeigh who was president or who his congressional representative was when he blew up the Murrah Building in 1995.
I never thought about getting any tattoos removed.
Rock is ironic in that, up to a certain point, you can get better and better at it if you don’t mind possibly looking more and more ridiculous.
I get along with Australians really well. Everyone’s usually really cool, and it’s always a drag to leave.
Maybe I’m ego-tripping, but I don’t find myself a particularly horrible person, so I don’t think I need to hold back anything I think or feel.
Harmony is boring.
Enough Americans saw fit to give president Obama a second term. I don’t think there will be many people keeping their Romney/Ryan bumper stickers on their cars.
You must never lower yourself to being a person you don’t like.
Kids need parents who love and support them unconditionally, full stop.
Canadians are often a friendly bunch.
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.
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.
I wonder if it is Australia’s great distance from more populated land masses that allows its inhabitants to be left to their own devices, to be incredibly creative and, at times, to be wonderfully weird.
I’d like to talk to Sean Hannity in a controlled environment and say, ‘O.K., you can’t interrupt and jump up and down like a professional wrestler.’
Guns are part of the American identity.
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.
Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.
It is very difficult to tell Americans that they can’t do something.
Young African-American males: Stop existing. It could get you killed.
The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.
Trayvon Martin did not need to die.
There’s something about being under-rested and knowing that the situation is going to remain that way for quite some time that makes things more meaningful.
Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.
Some music really does suck!
Even though I am not hungry when I get up, I try to eat to get me ready for the day. Within an hour of getting up.
Pizza makes me think that anything is possible.
The more I learn about Mr. Romney, the less there is to admire.
Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.
When you have to work with and exist amongst cynical, burned-out personnel on a set, it doesn’t matter what you’re shooting or how much you’re being paid – it’s not worth it.
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.
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.
Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.
I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.
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.
Music keeps you young. Having music in your life keeps you open to things.
I’m not interested in censorship. I like the First Amendment very much.
I wasn’t playing the music, the music was playing me… and once that went away, and I had the feeling I was playing music, I had to stop. The need to go onstage and get my brain flattened every night left me, and what I didn’t wanna do is go onstage and perpetrate a fraud… You cannot fool an audience.
It’s not lost on me that everyone dies, but some people have a kind of immortality about them, and you can’t imagine that they will ever be gone.
I remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I was up early watching television and watched the announcement. I didn’t understand what the word ‘assassinated’ meant.
I am on until I am dead, like a light bulb.
If some band sucks, you’re going to have to find out about it for yourself, because I don’t have the interest in issuing warnings.
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.
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.
I’m of the opinion that the Democrats have the ideas I agree with more often than not. Reenergizing the middle class and giving people a break.
There’s always going to be a need for activism; there’s always going to be a need for you and me doing the right thing, being very Lincoln-sonian in looking out for each other.
In the city of Pyongyang, you don’t have to look very far to see an image of the Great Leader, Kim Il Sung. They love the guy. He is responsible for the wonder that is North Korea.
As a young person, I wanted everyone to agree with me.
I love being a storyteller. I love telling stories.
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.
Change is hard, but change is good.
Live music is the cure for what ails ya.
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.
‘SMiLE’ is perhaps the Beach Boys‘ most legendary album. It was recorded in 1966 and 1967 but only saw a formal release in 2011. That’s a long time to wait for what was said to be Brian Wilson‘s masterpiece.
The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he’s a criminal instead of a scholar. It’s business.
Maybe I’m just a psycho, and the stage is a better place to go than either the loony bin or somewhere else.
We city dwellers, we residents of Los Angeles and the surrounding areas, are for the most part urbanized to some extent. We know deadlines, start times and traffic.
I’m not in a position where I get to pick and choose roles. I usually go on auditions in long lines and embarrass myself in front of casting directors, and with a lump in my throat and my ears burning, I walk past reception and smirking actors as I go to the parking garage and go back on the highway.
I love capitalism. It rewards me for being brave – it awards me for being innovative and thinking out of the box.
To hate is to show you still care, who needs that, focus on what’s really important.
I was in Pakistan in Islamabad when Bhutto was assassinated, and the next day, you know, there’s just plumes of smoke everywhere. I mean, Islamabad is on fire.
We spend millions of dollars to remove pain from our lives. It’s why so many people get hooked on painkillers. The body becomes addicted to painlessness. That tells you a lot.
The history of apartheid-era South Africa is incredibly sad and at times infuriatingly incomprehensible.
In winter, I plot and plan. In spring, I move.
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.
For me, returning to Los Angeles annihilates the memories of where I have just been with an astonishing speed.
Trying to write music, be in a band and keep it all happening is one of the hardest, morale-destroying, heartbreaking things you will ever try to do – and that’s when it’s going well.
I just get things done instead of talking about getting them done. I don’t go out and party. I don’t smoke, drink or do drugs and I’m not married, that leaves a lot of time for my work.
I’d like to talk to Arnold Schwarzenegger, ’cause I live in California and I just want to see that canned, chemical filled body in my office.
Having an identity is one thing. Being born into an identity is quite a different matter.
Every single record I have is a fossil.
I take the work seriously, just not myself in it.
A country that has been through as much as Vietnam has to have some crazy music somewhere.
Michele Bachmann is always a great person to go to for an opinion about anything. She has a very active and interesting mind.
I’m most comfortable on stage.
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.
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.
I never thought I was right for TV or that TV was right for me.
I think young people should travel and travel often to other countries… like I do.
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.
Pizza makes me think that anything is possible.
I still have dreams about CBGB’s. I still miss the place.
Giving a good performance, giving it all is what it’s all about. I love to perform.
I can deal with people who watch me on stage but I am not good in communicating with people any other way than through my work.
I wonder what it’s like to be from a state that is spread across a few islands way out in the Pacific Ocean, only added to the United States in 1959. Not only that but to be the birthplace of America’s first black president? Pretty cool, I bet.
That Newt Gingrich or any mainstream Republican has the nerve to look down from what they perceive as their moral mountaintop at anyone is laughable.
I’m a professional food eater.
Texas is a hotbed of insanely good bands and musicians.
I would like go to Palestine and interview people there about what their lives are like; same thing in Iran.
I can’t remember that I ever had just a minute of stage fright.
When someone asks you, ‘What’s punk?’ my reply is, ‘If you have to ask, you’re never going to know.’
It’s hard to get people at a record company to talk about music. They don’t seem to want to talk about music, it’s all marketing, and that’s part of a record, you gotta get it out there, people have gotta hear it, but you could do it in a way that’s not repulsive.
So I’m more at home with my backpack, sleeping in a hotel room or on a bus or on an airplane, than I am necessarily on a bed. It’s weird being here. It feels like I’m standing next to my real life.
The GOP grows more and more unpopular with female voters seemingly every time one of its leaders gets in front of a microphone. Misogynist is as misogynist does. The GOP and its bloviating pundits don’t like women and they are unable to hide it, nor do they seem to make much attempt to do so.
I believe that contentment or any sustained period of joy that doesn’t inspire thought that leads to action almost immediately is useless.
When I am in Africa, I realize I don’t know much, have not seen much, and there’s a lot to be done.
In the summer of ’84, you just couldn’t escape the Born in the USA record.
As far as I have been able to understand, the Japanese seem to keep things close to the vest. Friendly but remote and polite to the point of being invisible. It is in the music, literature, film and art that the Japanese really seem to express themselves.
This is my 25th year of being on stage. A lot of people who I kind of toed up to the starting line with are no longer in this position. I feel very, very lucky.
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.
I love to go on stage and sing.
When you are young, there is so much ahead of you, it’s like the Saharan desert. You can’t even see across it.
I don’t want to fail the audience. I don’t want to let them down.
It is just that I don’t want a wife and I don’t want kids.
Nothing brings people together more, then mutual hatred.
Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.
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.
Like a lot of inwardly drawn young people, I spent a lot of time in libraries. At my high school, I often spent my lunch breaks there.
I can only write about personal stuff, about my point of view.
If I’m in L.A. for longer than 20 days, I’m looking for work, because I don’t do vacations.
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.
The Wacken festival started more than 20 years ago with just a few hundred people in attendance. Tickets now sell out before the lineup is announced.
I need to do things on my own, need to be left alone.
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.
I mean I appreciate fan mail and that the people like what I am doing but I can’t answer it. If I would answer 25 letters a day I would be just a guy answering mail and not an artist anymore.
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.
I am neither pro- nor anti-gun. I am gun-conscious.
When people make my country look bad, I can’t stand it.
I don’t mean to be arrogant and I really appreciate my fans but talking about what I am doing is not something I’m good at. I do what I do and that’s it. I want to get back to my work and do more of it instead of talking about it.
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.
You don’t have to twist my arm to work.
I’m a good authoritarian figure; I don’t know why. ‘Can you be a cop?’ Sure. ‘Can you be a Marine?’ Absolutely. Well, at least in a movie.
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.
When I think of Mick Jagger still singing that he can’t get any satisfaction in over forty years of being in the Rolling Stones, I have to conclude that he’s either lying or not all that bright.
But I have a good life. I enjoy what I do. I am married to work.
