Top 200 Hank Green Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “The story of humanity is not a story of a few people who had huge, gigantic effects on the world. That’s only the story we hear, because it’s the easy story to tell. Caring for ourselves and other people is the only thing that has ever mattered to the future of our species.”

— Hank Green

52. “I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn’t a very happy child.”

— Hank Green

53. “The most insidious party of fame for April wasn’t that other people dehumanized her; it was that she dehumanized herself. She came to see herself not as a person but as a tool. And if that tool wasn’t being used, sharpened, refined, or strengthened at every opportunity, then she was letting the world down.”

— Hank Green

54. “Solve more problems than you create.”

— Hank Green

55. “The most impactful thing you can do with power is almost always to give it away.”

— Hank Green

56. “I know I’ve got self-worth issues. I just found out I was chosen as an emissary by an alien envoy to represent and protect the human race, and still I spent the afternoon searching for validation on Twitter.”

— Hank Green

57. “You say that, but have you played Cherry Blossom Fairy Five, April May? Have you?”

— Hank Green

58. “The most insidious part of fame for April wasn’t that other people dehumanized her; it was that she dehumanized herself. She came to see herself not as a person but as a tool.”

— Hank Green

59. “The internet is not something we have, it’s something we do.”

— Hank Green

60. “It turns out, somehow, there are a tremendous number of things to be optimistic about.”

— Hank Green

61. “An open market rewards people who work hard and think critically at first, but once real value is at stake, the market rapidly transforms to reward those with access to capital. The fact that, in this case, the capital is fame and not money only makes it that much more universal and interesting.”

— Hank Green

62. “If you’re wondering what the difference is, well fine art is like art that exists for its own sake. The Thing that fine art does is itself. Design is art that does something else. It’s more like visual engineering.”

— Hank Green

63. “We are each individual, but the far greater thing is what we are together, and if that isn’t protected and cherished, we are headed to a bad place.”

— Hank Green

64. “A friend of mine once told me that, no matter how much you proofread, the first time you open the final version of your book, you will find a typo on the very first page you look at. Ugh.”

— Hank Green

65. “The comments on YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter instantly switched from a small, friendly, supportive community to a selection of the loudest, most over-the-top opinions one could imagine. I was a traitor to my species. I was ultra-fuckable. I was a space alien. I was an ultra-fuckable space alien. And so on.”

— Hank Green

66. “Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world. And our guess is so obviously correct that other guesses seem, at best, willful ignorance – at worst, an attack.”

— Hank Green

67. “It was like putting a bottle cap in the ground and pulling out a coke.”

— Hank Green

68. “If we do not let people know that it is possible to be different, the ones who are different will live their entire lives in a kind of cultural prison. And there are so many ways to be different that almost everyone ends up feeling imprisoned by some aspect of a society that only allows for the default path.”

— Hank Green

69. “I’m sorry, Andy, I just don’t know what I’m doing. I feel like I’m being asked to be something I’m not. Why, of all people, are they asking me about this stuff? I’m barely anything. But I also like it, sometimes. I like it that people think my opinion matters. It’s just... I don’t know if it does.”

— Hank Green

70. “That’s what I’m afraid of, that we will become like that. I’m worried that we will outsource our satisfaction, and that our lives will get sucked into the nothingness of video games and television and shockingly realistic pornography. We will just get satisfied, and never drive ourselves forward. Society is fraying – the impact of the Carls, whatever you think about them, is clear. We’ve lost our way, we don’t have a vision for the future anymore.”

— Hank Green

71. “That unknown is a diamond in a universe of dirt. Uncertainty. Unpredictability. It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi’s poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, ‘Pivot.’ Every creation great and small, they are our diamonds.”

— Hank Green

72. “Fear is an even better fuel than anger.”

— Hank Green

73. “Most power just looks like an easier-than-average life. It’s so built-in that people mostly don’t realize how powerful they are. Like, the average middle-class person in the US is one of the 3 percent richest people in the world. Thus, they’re probably one of the most powerful people in the world. But, to them, they feel completely average.”

— Hank Green

74. “Every person who reads your book will be far more likely to be on your side. Books are the most intensive of all current media. People are willing to spend hours and hours with a book.”

— Hank Green

75. “Obviously, this is a profoundly unrelatable frustration, but we all only have our own lives to live inside of.”

— Hank Green

76. “The infernal day star is shining its radiation down upon us. I can feel it giving me cancer.”

— Hank Green

77. “We are all bat people.”

— Hank Green

78. “But when you walked out of that building, you created a new history that we have to live in now.” She did not say this as something I should be proud of, more something that I had to live with. The dart hit its mark.”

— Hank Green

79. “Carl just had too much mass – we couldn’t stop falling into his gravity any more than we could jump to the moon.”

— Hank Green

80. “You know what they didn’t do, though? They didn’t, not one single time, say, “What were you thinking?!” Not because they knew or because they understood – I really don’t think they did. They didn’t ask that because I sure as hell didn’t stab myself in the back, and when a radical extremist stabs someone in the back, the only person at fault is the radical extremist.”

— Hank Green

81. “The satisfaction? The joy? That comes from solving problems and making things.”

— Hank Green

82. “You don’t get to know where April and I went. I’ve had enough of that. We’re just here on planet Earth with the rest of the humans. Did we make a couple of not-super-well-thought-out financial decisions? Yeah, but we had to make a comfortable life for ourselves and Paulette. Paulette is our monkey.”

— Hank Green

83. “I saw myself as a leader of the community, not a member. I had no idea what a messed-up perspective that was at the time.”

— Hank Green

84. “But what about a Maximum Wage?”

— Hank Green

85. “Any good story is a mind-altering substance.”

— Hank Green

86. “We seek the safety of isolation even as it kills us.”

— Hank Green

87. “People who “don’t consider race or gender” sure seem to end up hiring almost all white guys, almost as if they’re absolutely considering race and gender.”

— Hank Green

88. “Here’s a hint: It’s not really “news” until they stop running ads.”

— Hank Green

89. “We all want to be in the room where it happens, we want to be part of the things that matter to us, but no two people have the exact same collection of things that matter. Nowadays, I don’t so much want to be in the room where it happens, but I do really want to help other people choose the right rooms, and help them realize that they really are a part of things that matter. Because when we feel like none of the rooms we are in matter, that’s when we’re really lost.”

— Hank Green

90. “The truest strength is shouldering the burden of care.”

— Hank Green

91. “Power concentrates naturally, but that concentration is, by itself, a problem.”

— Hank Green

92. “Even on this most terrible days, even when the worst of us are all we can think of, I am proud to be a human.”

— Hank Green

93. “So here’s a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool. So the moment you achieve perfect coolness is simultaneously the moment that you actually, completely don’t care. I didn’t care about the gravitas of that TV show, and the freedom and security and confidence that came with that was a rush. It took me a while to realize that the feeling I was feeling was power.”

— Hank Green

94. “Sometimes you need to buy a red dress because the alternative is the nightmare of loss.”

— Hank Green

95. “The thing about getting famous is that, often, the only people who are in a position to be honest with you about the realities of celebrity are the people who will make gobs of money if you go all in. They have no incentive to tell you the dirty truth, which Mr. Skampt attempted to tell me then.”

— Hank Green

96. “I wanted people to understand that we are a trash fire of a species, but also most people are pretty cool.”

— Hank Green

97. “The most sophisticated software in existence is tasked with figuring out how to keep you from leaving a website.”

— Hank Green

98. “It is when you turn your emotions into art. It is BTS and the Sistine Chapel and Rumi’s poetry and Ross Geller on the stairs yelling, ‘Pivot.”

— Hank Green

99. “I’m not much older now than I was then, but in a lot of ways, obviously, I’m a different person. So it is easy for me to recognize that I made some good decisions and some bad ones. But it’s telling that, with this, I knew it was a bad idea even then but I still couldn’t control myself. Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it. If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn’t have liked what I found, so I didn’t.”

— Hank Green

100. “Where is the president at this Time of Need! Probably playing shuffleboard or having her period!’ It’s not my fault I like shuffleboard so much. I always say, add up all the time every other president has spent golfing and tell me that my shuffleboard habit is bad for America.”

— Hank Green