Top 500 Henry Rollins Quotes (2025 Update)
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401. “When I write lyrics, it’s only when I’m angry or hurt or sad. So lyrically it’s never really easy going. And the music is always really intense.”

— Henry Rollins

402. “I live my life by the numbers. Not only am I an American, I am an Americanist.”

— Henry Rollins

403. “It is instilled in thousands of American males from an early age that one of their requirements is to be able to both dish out and take a lot of pain. They are taught the rules of this road in gyms, rings, backyards and fields all over America.”

— Henry Rollins

404. “With writing, there are multiple drafts. On stage, there is one take. I do a lot of preparation for shows, so, for the most part, what you hear me say is pretty much what I wanted to get at.”

— Henry Rollins

405. “I don’t cuss in songs. It’s too easy.”

— Henry Rollins

406. “Motivation has always been a fascinating factor when considering a touring artist, especially when the years stack up. What keeps one out there year after year?”

— Henry Rollins

407. “The arts in America exist in spite of America, not because of America.”

— Henry Rollins

408. “Imagine a 15-year-old kid saying, ‘I have two moms – it’s cool.’ I don’t fear that at all.”

— Henry Rollins

409. “I got three letters today telling me that I’m god. Why can’t I pay the rent?”

— Henry Rollins

410. “It took me until my teenage years to realize that I was medicating with music. I was pushing back against my stupid school uniform, instructors who called me by my last name and my classmates, who, while friendly enough, were not at all inspiring.”

— Henry Rollins

411. “There are religions and social and moral awareness in any society that gets passed immediately. Those human truths. All cultures address them.”

— Henry Rollins

412. “I take the work seriously, just not myself in it.”

— Henry Rollins

413. “So many Americans, for one reason or another, they watch the news and it doesn’t really give them the idea of the world. Or they don’t read or travel. They have no idea that America is part of the world and not the world itself.”

— Henry Rollins

414. “If there is one set of laws, one Constitution for every citizen, its protections hopefully applied equally to all, then why do the results seem to differ so radically? What do you call that? Look around – you’re living in it.”

— Henry Rollins

415. “I don’t know how much you follow current events. For some, there’s not enough time to keep up on what’s happening; for others, the news is too depressing, and peering too deeply fills one with boiling frustration all too quickly.”

— Henry Rollins

416. “Never once have I thought that Social Security would be something that would ever be available to me.”

— Henry Rollins

417. “Before the Civil War, the Southern states were selling a lot of cotton to England and didn’t seem to mind British occupation. By and large, the Revolutionary War wasn’t at all great for business.”

— Henry Rollins

418. “I think I am the most impressed with writing styles that defy category, like Kharms or Selby, Breton or Jarry, where you become as interested in the writer as much as the writing itself. It’s all these things that make reading so appealing to me.”

— Henry Rollins

419. “This sounds really corny, but I am a slave to my work, a workaholic, and glad of it. I like what I do; this is my place, my little universe, one of them.”

— Henry Rollins

420. “I wonder if it is Australia’s great distance from more populated land masses that allows its inhabitants to be left to their own devices, to be incredibly creative and, at times, to be wonderfully weird.”

— Henry Rollins

421. “Americans are poorly served by their media, you know, for the war machine and propaganda machine and the global empire and they’re poorly served by what they are being told is representative government.”

— Henry Rollins

422. “I tend to gravitate to the darkest or most obscure part of any venue in an effort to have my own space to experience the music on my own, free from unwanted conversations and other distractions.”

— Henry Rollins

423. “I do a lot of stuff for free anyway. Like a lot of people who you see who don’t need money. Mick Jagger – he needs money? He just likes to go sing Satisfaction every night. If I wrote that song I probably would do it too.”

— Henry Rollins

424. “Rarely do I do film press because I’m so low on the food chain of the movie, and for me it’s just this thing I did for four weeks before the next tour started.”

— Henry Rollins

425. “Most Americans are very cool people.”

— Henry Rollins

426. “I really like older writers, perhaps because they take me out of my element. I don’t have a great deal of interest in reading a fictionalized present as it’s pretty insane as it is.”

— Henry Rollins

427. “As long as I tell the truth I feel that nobody can touch me.”

— Henry Rollins

428. “I don’t know if music has ever achieved anything past appealing to the people that it appeals to. If a song could stop a war, then Bob Marley and Bob Dylan songs would have stopped one or two.”

— Henry Rollins

429. “When you title yourself, you immediately lend yourself to all kinds of pretension.”

— Henry Rollins

430. “There’s always going to be a need for activism; there’s always going to be a need for you and me doing the right thing, being very Lincoln-sonian in looking out for each other.”

— Henry Rollins

431. “My father did not rock. He just earned and hated. Don’t end up like this man.”

— Henry Rollins

432. “I would like go to Palestine and interview people there about what their lives are like; same thing in Iran.”

— Henry Rollins

433. “But I have a good life. I enjoy what I do. I am married to work.”

— Henry Rollins

434. “I find it takes a lot of strength to endure myself.”

— Henry Rollins

435. “Whenever any great song or album gets lost in the ether, someone is deprived of the joy of hearing it, and the great effort of those who created and recorded the work is damaged.”

— Henry Rollins

436. “I get angry about stuff, I get very emotionally intense about stuff and that’s how I get it out – with books, with the band, on my own onstage, but it’s always kind of a wail.”

— Henry Rollins

437. “The world’s a better place since I chose music. I like the physical aspect of it, the volume and the intensity of it. It’s loud and hard. I like all that because inside me I feel like screaming.”

— Henry Rollins

438. “Put temptation on the unenjoyment line.”

— Henry Rollins

439. “While I disagree with our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan, I have nothing but respect and admiration for the men and women deployed in these places.”

— Henry Rollins

440. “I have had a number of less-than-enviable moments in my life when dealing with other people. I won’t attempt to blunt that by saying I am not the only one.”

— Henry Rollins

441. “With a book, there’s no volume to turn up. You’re very naked with a book.”

— Henry Rollins

442. “I guess, topic to topic, you could consider me a left-leaning person.”

— Henry Rollins

443. “One of the odd enjoyments in life is to be alone in a room full of people. To have them there as unknowing human filler in your wide shot.”

— Henry Rollins

444. “The number of people who are actual supporters of Mr. Romney could very well be less than the Donner Party, whose members they sadly resemble in many ways.”

— Henry Rollins

445. “In many ways, America is on the receiving end of a pendulum that has been swung with great force, and for a long time, outward into the world. The impact is a wake-up call on every level.”

— Henry Rollins

446. “Someone like Ashlee Simpson, she lip-synchs on ‘Saturday Night Live,’ gets totally called out la Milli Vanilli, and no one really cares that much. It doesn’t make me hate Ashlee; she’s just taking instructions.”

— Henry Rollins

447. “I never think of what it’s going to be like later. I only think in the present tense. The only time I think backwards is when I have to reissue something.”

— Henry Rollins

448. “I’m disappointed by bands left and right, every day.”

— Henry Rollins

449. “I’m not trying to say I’m a big tough guy, I’m a typical American waist deep in this violent culture.”

— Henry Rollins

450. “I think Americans suffer for their lack of travel, awareness of the world. It has horribly warped our sense of place in the scheme of things.”

— Henry Rollins