Top 934 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Rollins - Page 14

Nowadays, the media have to be there to keep you from asking too many questions, from getting together with other people who might want to do the Jeffersonian thing and call out the government.

We are occupants. No one has any lasting purchase on life or on the planet.

What I'm saying is America has a job deficit because hundreds of thousands of jobs went elsewhere. Not because [Barack] Obama raised your taxes. He, in fact, lowered them. They are lower.

Retirement in another country is your body is too racked with pain and your hands are too arthritic from the life in the rice patty fields, so you can't work anymore.

All my big heroes are literary, writers. I'd love to meet Jimmy Hendrix or John Coltrane, but I'd much rather meet Thomas Wolfe, or F. Scott Fitzgerald. Words and books have always meant a lot to me. That someone can take words and string them together to where they will move me is just a hell of a thing. It's amazing to me; more amazing to me than music or painting. It's always been the written word or the spoken word, like a great lecture or a great lyric, or a great poem. To me it's just amazing. And I always aspire toward capturing that, or my version of it.

I think as resources become more dear, we really need to consider population.

Joe Strummer, Johnny Rotten, and Ian MacKaye were all people who really made me see things differently.

I don't have any spiritual anything.You shoot a guy with a gun, he dies. You step on a bug, the bug dies. There is no heaven for me and no hell. And certainly not any Karma.

I recycle and try to be nice to the earth. But flora and fauna have always interested me, and it is because of so many years of summer camp and growing up in DC with Rock Creek Park fairly near me, or Glover Park; I lived in Glover Park for a while and that park was in my backyard.

I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher's well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

What I've found is that a lot of soldiers are surprisingly apolitical. Their reality is, "Today I'm going to leave the gate for twelve hours, and I'm going to make it back to the dining facility by sundown with the arms and legs of me and my buddies intact."

I can say that American men and women in the Military are damn impressive.

There are other people, other economies, governments, cultures, religions, and destinies going on at the same time as yours. You have to widen the scope of your lens and start seeing more. Because Americans, it's easy to make us freak out. When the going gets rough, you have to get conservative. That's what's happened to America in the last eight years. I just try to point out that there's more going on than most people pay attention to.

There's nothing funny about, 'Yeah, I took a First Class plane ticket and I went to some designer beach and made out with a Laotian slave girl.' Who cares?

When I was a kid looking at pictures of the Sphynx, and the Pyramids, and different tribes in Africa, all of that stuck with me, and I always wanted to see those things and meet those people.

There is a concerted effort to keep you and me, you know, the people, away from what it [war] really looks like, 'cause when you're selling war, when it's such a big industry. What they don't tell you is the rest of it and the down side of it. And so obviously there is a lot of money and a lot of time and effort being spent on that campaign "perpetual war for perpetual peace".

I'm not trying to amass people in the streets. I just want them to be more aware. 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. And so anything from the travel stories I tell, that's what I'm trying to get across.

Quite often governments are one way and the people are another. You can't judge the many by the actions of a few. 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. All these places I go, people say that America is good and I'm like, "Well, thank you, I'm glad you can see it." And you know - we are good, we've just got work to do.

The talking shows allow me to come out of my cave and that's why those shows go on for so long. I hate walking off stage. Sometimes I walk off and I miss them as I'm walking off the stage. I wonder if they'll let me go another hour. That's why I do it: to communicate, to get points across.

I guess I am famous in a way. I would rather consider it recognizable - I think that is more logical. I don't feel famous.

I always took quite seriously the things that Chuck D. of Public Enemy had to say. He's always been someone I've learned quite a bit from and someone I pay a great deal of attention to.

An appreciation of animals is good for a human, it can lead to a better understanding and respect for all living things.

The most interesting place by far was Afghanistan. Just because it is a place that I cannot see myself living. The hardness of the people and the history of the country is just so completely intense.

I've never killed anybody... but I've definitely thought about it.

In America, quite often, for people from a certain economic position two choices become very evident as to their adult life. One is crime, one is the military. And it is quite often that some people choose one or the other, their options not being as many as someone from a higher income.

I would never be innovative enough to "blaze my own trail," I'm just trying to be interesting. So I don't look to anyone else as far as inspiration.

Bono actually gets a lot of substantial work done. The guy really does put a lot of things together and, while I'm not a fan of his music, I greatly applaud his humanitarian efforts.

Punk-rock gave music back to people. 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. Me and [Minor Threat and Fugazi vocalist] Ian MacKaye would go to these concerts, and it was fun.

We Americans look funny when we're in France because we don't travel, we are fairly un-cultured whereas Europeans go to Africa all the time because it's right there.

I have built my life to pursue the new. I don't have family, don't know many people and I am usually ready to leave within an hour.

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.

Capitalism does what it does and money doesn't belong to anybody. It just stays in someone's wallet for a while, then it goes somewhere else. It always goes somewhere and it is always about to go somewhere.

As far as what people think of me, maybe my stuff should just be put online for free downloads when I'm gone.

I think that one of the hardest things in the world to be is a black male. I mean everyone hates your guts. White men are afraid of you. White women are afraid of you. The cops hate you. The government wants you dead. Your own people want to shoot you for what you got. You just can't get over it. And even if you are able to get over it you're forced to do it on the white guy's terms.

We're just very belligerent, and I'm not trying to put Americans down, by and large I think we're nice people, but we operate with the information we're given and we are limited by the ignorance that is kind of injected into the media and into the TV shows.

I do a lot of stuff for free anyway. Like a lot of people who you see who don't need money. Mick Jagger - he needs money? He just likes to go sing Satisfaction every night. If I wrote that song I probably would do it too.

There's nothing new about the government protecting corporations and calling it the freeing of the world or bringing democracy to bereft nations.

The government is a functionary of the corporations - and there's nothing new about that. You can find people in the 1930s talking about the army basically working for Wall Street in all of these countries [it invades].

I've never been in a situation where I had to run for my life, but I've been bitten by a lot of poisonous snakes where it was fairly painful. Pythons of size have a lot of teeth in that mouth, it's a painful bite and those wounds get infected fairly easily. I've got snake wounds from these animals that have lasted quite a while where it'll ache for several days. Having said that, I've been lucky; it's not like I'm looking for trouble with these animals either. It's not an envelope I'm willing to push.

But can a song stop a war? If Bob Marley and Bob Dylan couldn't do it, it can't be done.

When you put yourself in environments that continually test you, that's where all the good stories come from. That's where the jokes come from is from the shitty parts.

When you're little and you don't have much dough, you have to innovate. You have to be sharp.

I come from a minimum wage working world, as we all did for at least some part of our lives, and that is never out of my rearview. I've never forgotten how much your feet hurt after you've stood on them for like 12 hours. And how the drudgery of a job you hate craps on your entire life; how you treat other people, how you treat yourself, and it really was getting to me.

Nietzsche, who you don't spend too much time with after the age of seventeen, did have that one great line about "he who stares into the abyss must know that the abyss also stares into him" and I never really understood that until my friend got killed and you really get your head around the idea of what horror means. It's a truly awful thing, to really, kind of have that understanding of things and when you really peer into that.

That's where the economy is going. It went somewhere. Just not to America. And the money made? That went to the Cayman Islands and Switzerland. Not back here. Never to be taxed.

While I have not ruled out the possibility of doing music, what I don't want to do is go onstage and perform old songs. I do, all the time, but I don't think it is artistically brave.

There is no heaven for me and no hell. And certainly not any Karma.

When you're very young, images that you upload into your very young mind tend to stay with you.

You can say, "Well, I have a question," and someone will say, "Oh, so you hate America." And it has nothing to do with the discussion at all.

Some people tell me that they like what I do, which is great, of course. The perfect irony and truth is that I need them much more than they need me.

I'm always looking, people are always presenting and I have found that every year of my life there's been great bands. All over the world, all the time. So when someone goes, "Music sucks now!" I'll go, "I don't think so. Not over at my house."

I never think of what it's going to be like later. I only think in the present tense. The only time I think backwards is when I have to reissue something.

I'm not a young man, and I can find intensity in a lot of different ways, sometimes without even raising my voice. When I was younger, it was all about how I need three extra sets of lungs to get enough wind to get out the thing at the screaming level I need to, because that's the way it needs to be. Now, I see that there's a whole lot of other colors on the palette.

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.

Well, there's Katrina, but you can go through lots of Kurdistan and it looks like Katrina was just there but there's people living in it.

I think that Goldman Sachs and the Pentagon determine more of America's outcome then any president or any congress, that sounds a bit cynical, but I think I am right.

I think there is something very interesting about people who live day to day in an environment where they could get taken out by a wild animal. There has to be some kind respect that is derived from that relationship.

I have no pride about anything I have done. It's just not the way I think about things. I do the work, always, as hard as I can, to the point of pain, injury, exhaustion, if that is what it takes. Once I am done, I move on.

My favorite species to study would be Cobras and King Cobras which are two different families. They're very intelligent, and they're beautiful looking animals. Where they come from are countries and regions which I spend a lot of time in - South East Asia and India, those are places I go to fairly often, and so the cobras are my main interest. It's not a snake I can maintain, but when I see them in zoos and what not, I find them interesting.

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.