Top 200 Hank Green Quotes (2026 Update)
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101. “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

102. “My annoyance became frustration, which became anger, which became hate, and hate is a long-burning fuel.”

— Hank Green

103. “But when you walked out of that building, you created a new history that we have to live in now.”

— Hank Green

104. “As is often the case, it was the easier choice to make and the more difficult choice to live with.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

106. “The power that each of us has over complete strangers to make them feel terrible and and frightened and weak is amazing.”

— Hank Green

107. “I know that you’re going to have a very complicated lifer in the next weeks and months, and then you won’t have time for much else. But I also know that having someone that you care about and who cares about you might help keep you connected to reality.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

109. “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

110. “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

111. “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

112. “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

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

— Hank Green

114. “It’s weird to talk about these things as if they are fact since they were in a dream, but the fact that everyone experienced it in precisely the same way made it feel concrete. What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? The Dream, in that sense, was very, very real.”

— Hank Green

115. “But what about a Maximum Wage?”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

117. “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

118. “It’s so much easier for people to get excited about disliking something than agreeing to like it.”

— Hank Green

119. “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

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

— Hank Green

121. “Anyway, we’re left with three possibilities. I have forgotten something very basic about a topic I know a great deal about, and so has everyone else I’ve talked to about this, including people who are smarter and know more than me. Someone has constructed a new material that behaves unlike anything that currently exists, or should be able to exist, and then put it on the sidewalk for everyone to see. Carl is alien. And I don’t mean alien like “weird.” I.”

— Hank Green

122. “I didn’t feel like there would be excitement or support on the other side of that conversation, so I just kept not having it.”

— Hank Green

123. “I think part of the point of loving someone is being able to deal with their brokenness.”

— Hank Green

124. “My path forward was the opposite of theirs and theirs was the opposite of mine. It distilled itself down until all that was left was the argument. And maybe, lurking just beneath that, the hatred.”

— Hank Green

125. “Stop thinking about my poop.”

— Hank Green

126. “It’s so much harder to actually define yourself and work to imagine the best possible future than it is to tear down others’ ideas.”

— Hank Green

127. “One of the best things about having money is paying people to do good work.”

— Hank Green

128. “Collections of individuals are beautiful, but they are as common as pelagibacter. Collections of ideas are veins of gold in our universe. They must be cherished and protected.”

— Hank Green

129. “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

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

— Hank Green

131. “I miss that life so much I would end every panda to get it back.”

— Hank Green

132. “I also remember defining myself by the people and the things that I hated rather than what I liked, thinking that it was cooler to be jaded than to be careful with other people.”

— Hank Green

133. “Next time you have a bad day, remember that it is amazing that you are alive at all, much less a member of a self-aware species living at the height of human technological progress.”

— Hank Green

134. “I hope you don’t feel like you have to represent all black people with me,” I said. “I hope you’re not, like, careful all the time.” “No, April.” And then it was a long time before she continued. “I’m careful with you for different reasons.”

— Hank Green

135. “What if you want to get across a busy intersection, but you can’t stop? What if you can’t even slow down? Because that’s where you’re at right now. Right now, humanity has to keep accelerating simply to support itself. But from left and right, massive hulks threaten to knock into you. Pandemics, climate change, bigotry, inequality, wars, water scarcity, sea level rise, and some that you do not enough to see yet. You have to dodge them, but you cannot stop, and you cannot slow down.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

137. “Every black person who spends time with a lot of white people eventually ends up being asked to speak for every black person and I hate that. It’s really stupid. And everyone gets to respond to that idiocy however they want. But my anxiety eventually made me extremely careful about everything I said, because of course I don’t represent capital-B Black People, but if people think I do, then I still feel a responsibility to try to do it well.”

— Hank Green

138. “The clattering of humanity mixed in all its randomness was as relaxing to me as crickets chirping beside a rushing brook.”

— Hank Green

139. “What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way?”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

141. “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

142. “I don’t even know what it would be like to not be attracted to a person because of their gender.”

— Hank Green

143. “One of the most powerful traits of your system is how ardently you believe in your individuality while simultaneously operating almost entirely as a collective.”

— Hank Green

144. “The worst thing about these people is that they didn’t usually feel fear themselves; they were just using it to get attention and grow their influence. As long as this tactic worked, they would never stop.”

— Hank Green

145. “Well, if I weren’t so insecure, I would have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to spend every day of my life getting really good at seeming confident.”

— Hank Green

146. “One day, an internet company wants to sell books, and then ten years later they’re a threat to nearly every industry on earth.”

— Hank Green

147. “We are irrational beings, easy to manipulate if you’re willing to do whatever it takes. That’s exactly how terrorists convince themselves that murder is worthwhile. And the wound it left, it was larger than those lives lost; it was a wound we would all have to live with forever. The purity of my feeling for Carl was gone and I would never get it back.”

— Hank Green

148. “Oakland Carl was the only Carl in the San Francisco Bay Area, and San Franciscans were, frankly, offended.”

— Hank Green

149. “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

150. “So you officially have an employee. They make your life easier, but only if you use them.”

— Hank Green