Top 200 Hank Green Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 4 of 5

151. “Just working through what other people had done gave me a feeling that this was all actually worth it. When you get stuck fighting small battles, it makes you small. Hopping from cable news show to cable news show to discuss controversy after controversy had made me small. I thought only about the fight, not why I was fighting.”

— Hank Green

152. “That entire conversation had the feeling of a pleasant stroll inches away from the edge of the Grand Canyon.”

— Hank Green

153. “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

154. “You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes say that beauty is all in the eye of the one beholding the beauty. And, indeed, we don’t get to decide if we are beautiful.”

— Hank Green

155. “This is not something that can un-happen to you.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

157. “People were going to read it and, I hoped, maybe some minds would be changed. Ultimately, almost everyone who read that book was already on my side, and the only thing it served to do was make people like me angrier.”

— Hank Green

158. “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

159. “You grant companies access to your attention so that they can alter your choices in exchange for entertainment. You identify with groups and grant them the ability to choose for you which problems you will be most concerned about. You listen to a friend when they care about something, and then you care about it too. 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

160. “And that was a job at a doomed start-up funded by the endless well of rich people who can only dream the most boring dream a rich person can dream: being even more rich.”

— Hank Green

161. “The emptiness and silence of this apartment compounded by my knowledge that I was, for the first time in my life, the only person sleeping in my home. This forced me to realize that, while I wanted to be fiercely myself, I also wanted someone around to see me so it.”

— Hank Green

162. “In any case, Maya’s efficiency of speech was extremely helpful in the maintenance of a relationship that I was subconsciously keeping on the knife-edge between casual and serious. She was capable of talking with her eyes and her body, but she mostly chose to use her mouth. I didn’t mind this.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

164. “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

165. “Frankly, I’ve worked my whole life to not be adorable with only limited success, and two adorable people dating is waaaay too cute for me.”

— Hank Green

166. “There was a bit of that “Oh my god, they’ve got three dimensions and a size and a shape and I’m seeing a person with my own eyes that I have previously only seen through the eyes of cameras” feeling that you get with any famous person. That’s a weird thing, and it’s a very interesting and complex experience.”

— Hank Green

167. “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

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

— Hank Green

169. “Someone somewhere was pretty sure you were going to destroy yourself, and they felt like you were worth saving, so they sent me.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

171. “I read to occupy a mind other than my own.”

— Hank Green

172. “To me it just seemed like that incurable ailment so many well-off dudes have, believing despite mountains of evidence that what the world truly needs is another white-guy comedy podcast.”

— Hank Green

173. “Much of the best art is about balancing between reflecting culture while simultaneously being removed from it and commenting on it. In.”

— Hank Green

174. “There’s that period in there, generally six to nine hours, in which you just aren’t anymore. Excuse me for having thought about this a lot, but how does it not terrify us that we spend a third of every day in a conscious unconsciousness, living inside a virtual reality created by our own minds but that somehow we don’t control? Like... what?!”

— Hank Green

175. “It’s basically just like every other room full of people you’ve ever been in, except exactly half of it looks extremely fancy and important, and the other half is just concrete and scaffolding.”

— Hank Green

176. “Now, of course, I know how easy it is to feel like you don’t matter if no one’s watching.”

— Hank Green

177. “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

178. “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

179. “The realization that we were actually doing this, and what it could result in, never really struck me. We just did it.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

181. “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

182. “What are your goals with the book? What do you want everyone to think when they finish it? Do you want them to understand you? Do you want them to understand your story?”

— Hank Green

183. “Basically, do your best to mock and deride their connection to and appreciation of you because, deep down, you dislike yourself enough that you cannot imagine anyone worthwhile actually wanting to be with you. I mean, if they like you, there must be something wrong with them, right?”

— Hank Green

184. “I don’t read a ton, but I know that you usually have to flip through publisher information and title pages and “This one’s for my patient and loving wife, Katherine” before you hit the actual book.”

— Hank Green

185. “So how do you do it? Not make a baby, balance an equation. I did biology last year.”

— Hank Green

186. “They tell you power corrupts. They never tell you how quickly.”

— Hank Green

187. “You’re radically collaborative, profoundly empathetic, and deeply communal. Everyone who tells you anything different is selling the fear that is the only thing that can break that nature.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

189. “Not that I wasn’t also having fun. Ripping the Defenders’ arguments to shreds and then reading all the comments agreeing passionately with me and electronically patting me on my cybershoulders was thrilling. 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

190. “At some point, we have to realize that the places where we share information are not services we use, they are places where we live... this platform should not be something that a few billionaires have complete control over.”

— Hank Green

191. “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

192. “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

193. “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

194. “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

195. “It’s a huge burden to live in a world where we don’t know how we’ve been physically changed and psychologically manipulated by an outside intelligence. p55.”

— Hank Green

196. “We would like to build the idea of April May to help people deal with the reality of Carl.”

— Hank Green

197. “I never stopped feeling like being the first to send a text would be intruding upon the real main characters of the story.”

— Hank Green

198. “If you want to be happy, let go of your wants. If you want to be effective, harness them.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

200. “You’re just trying to find an audience who will love you and I’m not enough.”

— Hank Green