Top 200 Hank Green Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “You say that, but have you played Cherry Blossom Fairy Five, April May? Have you?”

— Hank Green

52. “The solution is, everywhere and always, the decentralization and redistribution of all forms of power.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

55. “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

56. “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

57. “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

58. “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

59. “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

60. “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

61. “But what about a Maximum Wage?”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

67. “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

68. “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

69. “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

70. “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

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

— Hank Green

72. “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

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

— Hank Green

74. “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

75. “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

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

— Hank Green

77. “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

78. “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

79. “Human beings are terrible at accepting uncertainty, so when we’re ignorant, we make assumptions based on how we imagine the world.”

— Hank Green

80. “And it turns out, time does eventually pass no matter how anxious you are.”

— Hank Green

81. “At some point that night, I glimpsed my most probable future. That one day, the most interesting and important thing about me would be a thing that I did a long time ago.”

— Hank Green

82. “Speaking to humans was so vastly different from tweeting... But this way we all had to sit in the same set of thoughts for over an hour. The connection felt very good.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

84. “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

85. “Give yourself time to think. Don’t fill it all up with podcasts and TV shows. Talk it out, think it out, be present.”

— Hank Green

86. “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

87. “You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.”

— Hank Green

88. “I feel like a small dog is eating my eyeballs from the inside!”

— Hank Green

89. “Radicalization follows fear and insecurity, and as dissatisfaction grew, fewer and fewer people were interested in my nuanced, chill takes.”

— Hank Green

90. “He was one of thousands of people who scraped by filtering reality through their ideology and then yelling really loudly at the internet.”

— Hank Green

91. “Power only does all its business of empowering when it’s perceived as a difference between the power of those nearby and, even more important, the power one previously had.”

— Hank Green

92. “Somehow she made me feel human, and that is, I’ve learned, one of the best things to be.”

— Hank Green

93. “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

94. “I was really, deeply, honestly, and truly infatuated with having people pay attention to me.”

— Hank Green

95. “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

96. “It’s so much easier for people to get excited about disliking something than agreeing to like it. The circle jerk of mockery and self-congratulation was so intense I didn’t even notice I was at its center. It was so easy to get people to follow me, and in the end, that’s what I wanted.”

— Hank Green

97. “Stop thinking about my poop.”

— Hank Green

98. “It’s important to remember that we all change each other’s minds all the time. Any good story is a mind-altering substance.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

100. “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