Top 934 Quotes & Sayings by Henry Rollins - Page 2

I can't remember that I ever had just a minute of stage fright.

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 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.

I contribute a large amount of money to the Southern Poverty Law Center, so I'm on their mailing list for all their Klan Watch newsletters. I'm very well aware of White Power movements in America.

When someone asks you, 'What's punk?' my reply is, 'If you have to ask, you're never going to know.'

As long as I tell the truth I feel that nobody can touch me.

If I had to live my life in anticipation of what others thought of me, little would get done.

I need to do things on my own, need to be left alone.

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.

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.

Do you know why Albert Camus was so prolific? He wrote to keep from screaming.

When I'm off the road, and I can really control my diet down to the calorie, I juice seven days a week. Every afternoon, whatever I have at hand, beets, carrots, ginger, whatever. I juice, literally, every single day. And on the road, I try to find fresh juice wherever I can.

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.

There is no way you are going to be forgiven for blowing up a village and killing a bunch of people.

I don't want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride.

To hate is to show you still care, who needs that, focus on what's really important.

I want to change things for the better, just like everybody else.

Ramones music has a Pavlovian effect on me - the song starts, and the world blurs around the sound.

When a band becomes as truly iconic as the Velvet Underground, there will often be a box set released, overburdened with mediocre material that dilutes what was fine left on its own.

Consumerism is at once the engine of America and simultaneously one of the most revealing indicators of our collective shallowness.

A country that has been through as much as Vietnam has to have some crazy music somewhere.

For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.

Music keeps you young. Having music in your life keeps you open to things.

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 must never lower yourself to being a person you don't like.

Without an education, you won't have a future.

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.

America is a country born from semi-mythologized blood, glory and acts of selfless patriotic sacrifice.

I am neither pro- nor anti-gun. I am gun-conscious.

If you paid Americans a living wage, they would be able to pay for products made by Americans in America.

I'm not interested in censorship. I like the First Amendment very much.

The first Van Halen album makes Johnny Rotten out to be what he really was and still is: a hairdresser.

It has been hard to get my head around how Justice Antonin Scalia rationalizes his decisions. His body blow to the Voting Rights Act was a head scratcher, but at least he was calm when he attempted to justify his odd logic.

After I left D.C. to join Black Flag, I felt I was in a band.

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'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.'

When people hold you in high esteem, it's very delicate relationship. When they meet you they're putting all their chips up. It's make or break.

The only thing about sanctions is that, like a lot of drone strikes, there are countless unintended victims. Cutting off aid to Uganda only increases the pain there.

When I read that Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 had disappeared - a state-of-the-art Boeing 777, said to be an incredibly safe way to travel - I waited patiently for the chance to learn what happened.

Young, gay and stuck in Arkansas? Sounds like a horror flick.

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.

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.

Mr. Christ, I read you as an infinitely patient entity who, as they say, often works in mysterious ways, a rebel unafraid to take the tougher, less traveled paths. Seems to me you're playing the long game. Is that why more states are coming out in favor of marriage equality? Is that why the Affordable Care Act is now with us?

I know I was a generic dysfunctional child, but I think a lot of people are.

Could it be that violence is as much a part of the American identity as the Constitution, and a vital component to its economic stability?

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.

I'm terrified of motorcycles. I've been on one a couple of times. I did not like it.

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.

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.

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.

I'm pessimistic. I don't think that justice always gets the right person.

Literally thousands of lawsuits have been filed against the NFL by retired players, many of whom say that information on brain injury in football was withheld from them.

Everyone who knows me knows that I'm a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.

August, the summer's last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor.

Having an identity is one thing. Being born into an identity is quite a different matter.

Death metal uses a lot of white face paint and black hair dye to make its point. I quite enjoy this genre for its intensity, extremism and underlying irony: You have to be alive to play it and listen to it.

I have not the smarts or patience for political office.

Giving a good performance, giving it all is what it's all about. I love to perform.

Being unique is never easy, and often, by the time culture catches up with you, there are only a few people who notice.

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.