Top 200 Hank Green Quotes (2026 Update)
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151. “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

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

— Hank Green

153. “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

154. “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

155. “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

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

158. “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

159. “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

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

— Hank Green

161. “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

162. “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

163. “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

164. “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

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

— Hank Green

166. “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

167. “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

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

172. “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

173. “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

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

— Hank Green

175. “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

176. “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

177. “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

178. “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

179. “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

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. “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

183. “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

184. “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

185. “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

186. “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

187. “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

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

191. “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

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green

195. “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

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

— Hank Green

197. “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

198. “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

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

— Hank Green

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

— Hank Green