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

151. “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

152. “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

153. “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

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

156. “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

157. “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

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Hank Green

161. “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

162. “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

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

— Hank Green

164. “If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn’t have liked what I found, so I didn’t.”

— Hank Green

165. “Do I sound like a complete idiot when I talk about this stuff?” I asked. “It’s just a little surprising how fast you’ve gone from zero to sixty.” She did not seem enthusiastic. “Because of how slow I was in figuring out other stuff?” This was a not-so-subtle reference to the solid year of living together it took for us to hook up. I crawled over her laptop and kissed her. “You’re a little manipulative, you know that?” “Uh-huh, but you? Never.” “Let’s make this decision later,” she said.”

— Hank Green

166. “The whole time I was in front of the camera, I was thinking of the artist. A fellow creator who had poured her soul into something truly remarkable that might simply be ignored by the whole world. I was trying to get in her head. I was trying to figure out why she had created this thing and, in the same breath, calling out the world for its callous ignorance of beauty and form... I wanted people to wae up and spend a few moments looking at the exceptional amazement of human creation.”

— Hank Green

167. “I don’t think any of us are blameless when we all, more and more often, see ourselves not as members of a culture but as weapons in a war.”

— Hank Green

168. “But one thing that I didn’t anticipate was that, in creating the April May brand, I was very much creating a new me. You can only do so much pretending before you become the thing you’re pretending to be.”

— Hank Green

169. “God cares for everyone, but society is supposed to as well. We strive to live in a world that places tremendous, even infinite value on a single human life. We do not live in that society.”

— Hank Green

170. “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

171. “They had jackhammered under the one in Oakland. It remained there, hanging above the space where the sidewalk had been.”

— Hank Green

172. “There are a lot of self-help bros who will tell you that you need to dangle over the edge without a net to really drive achievement. I used to believe this because it has a little piece of the truth. The larger picture, of course, is that being deprived of safety tends to make people anxious, reactive, and unproductive. p37.”

— Hank Green

173. “It might be that saving the world is idiotically simple. Maybe we just need to connect and care for one another.”

— Hank Green

174. “Their constant attacks meant I never had to doubt my message.”

— Hank Green

175. “Reasoned, caring conversations that considered the complexity of other perspectives didn’t get views. Rants did. Outrage did. Simplicity did.”

— Hank Green

176. “You are so... human. You still think it has to be someone. It wasn’t anyone, it was all of you.”

— Hank Green

177. “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.”

— Hank Green

178. “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

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

— Hank Green

180. “Your life is written on this body, and I love every piece of it.”

— Hank Green

181. “Powerful people always thought they had the solutions. What they couldn’t see was that their power was, itself, the problem.”

— Hank Green

182. “I’d heard all this before, but I also knew that this line of argument worked. If you tell people that they’re being attacked for their beliefs, then suddenly they want to defend their beliefs, even if they didn’t really believe them before. It’s pretty amazing, really.”

— Hank Green

183. “Being annoyed by carefully crafted internet personas was part of my carefully crafted internet persona. Even.”

— Hank Green

184. “And frustrating because, good lord god almighty, I know that you are a good person, but the last thing you need is some other sign from heaven that you are special.” She sighed.”

— Hank Green

185. “It’s so easy to forget being wrong.”

— Hank Green

186. “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

187. “You’re talking about yourself like you’re a tool, but you’re a person too. And an evolving one. This will affect your life forever.”

— Hank Green

188. “This was always the way of these strongmen. They would craft the fear so carefully and then toss it into the world for everyone to use. And when someone took that fear and destroyed with it, they were just “unstable” or “mentally ill.”

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

190. “But your real is real whether you deal with it or not.”

— Hank Green

191. “It was telling that he had taken responsibility for the thing that he did... but he did not mention the things done in his name. This was always the way of these strongmen. They would craft the fear so carefully and then toss it into the world for everyone to use. And when someone took that fear and destroyed with it, they were just “unstable” or “mentally ill”.”

— Hank Green

192. “You do the things you have to do in the order you have to do them.”

— Hank Green

193. “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

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

— Hank Green

195. “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

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

— Hank Green

197. “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

198. “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

199. “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

200. “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