100+ Motivational Henry Rollins Quotes to Help You Life Your Best Life

Henry Rollins is a musician best known as the frontman for the hardcore punk band Black Flag. He’s also an outspoken progressive activist who regularly weighs in on political issues facing our nation and the world broadly.

He is widely known for his blunt style that pulls no punches and leaves no question as to who he is or what he stands for. Since Black Flag broke up in 1986, Rollins has invested his time in speaking opportunities, podcasts, and other methods of sharing his wisdom with all of us.

Artists like Rollins can teach us a lot about ourselves, each other, and the world. Here, I’ve collected the very best Henry Rollins quotes to inspire and motivate your success.

Top 100 Henry Rollins Quotes

The Very Best Henry Rollins Quotes

A text conversation is a short exchange of often grossly truncated language that corresponds to a thought made all the more shallow by the process.

I think it’s fantastic when the young enrage their elders. I really do believe that if it’s too loud, you are indeed too old, and that if it has been standing for too long, it needs a thorough inspection.

Where there is young people and vitality, you’re going to find punk rock.

I don’t have a crystal ball, but I’m willing to bet one of my arms right now that as long as there’s electricity, Ramones music is going to be relevant.

Live music is the cure for what ails ya.

Without an education, you won’t have a future.

There’s a lot of mountain climbers trapped inside of bodies of people behind the counter at Kinko’s.

Nothing brings people together more, then mutual hatred.

I believe that contentment or any sustained period of joy that doesn’t inspire thought that leads to action almost immediately is useless.

I think it is incumbent on anyone who can to lift human dignity to the highest possible levels, maintaining one’s own and helping to raise that of others.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Love

Everyone who knows me knows that I’m a hopeless romantic who listens to love ballads and doo-wop songs all the time.

The ecstatic insanity of romantic pursuit can be so enhanced by music that entire romantic conquests, victories and ruinous, crushing defeats can be tied to songs to such a degree that it’s almost unbearable to listen to them again, as they bring back the memories so vividly.

I’m 36 and if I met a woman of my own age and married her, I’d also be marrying her former life, her past. It might be OK for some people – I don’t want to judge it or anything – but it’s not for me. It would destroy my creativity.

Don’t do anything by half. If you love someone, love them with all your soul. When you go to work, work your ass off. When you hate someone, hate them until it hurts.

When people hold you in high esteem, it’s very delicate relationship. When they meet you they’re putting all their chips up. It’s make or break.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Strength

I can’t remember that I ever had just a minute of stage fright.

To hate is to show you still care, who needs that, focus on what’s really important.

Life will not break your heart. It’ll crush it.

Sometimes the truth hurts. And sometimes it feels real good.

So I’m more at home with my backpack, sleeping in a hotel room or on a bus or on an airplane, than I am necessarily on a bed. It’s weird being here. It feels like I’m standing next to my real life.

Now and then, someone is able to look at an empty space, conclude it would be a great place to start a revolution, and bravely go forward.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Having a Strong Body

Keep your blood clean, your body lean, and your mind sharp.

Scar tissue is stronger than regular tissue. Realize the strength, move on.

I try to get myself up and moving as early as possible. Optimum is to be on the treadmill while it is still dark outside.

There’s tons of junk food for your mind on the Internet. You can sit there for three or 10 or 20 hours a day getting in online arguments with other people who also choose to waste their time.

I just get things done instead of talking about getting them done. I don’t go out and party. I don’t smoke, drink or do drugs and I’m not married, that leaves a lot of time for my work.

When I’m off the road, and I can really control my diet down to the calorie, I juice seven days a week. Every afternoon, whatever I have at hand, beets, carrots, ginger, whatever. I juice, literally, every single day. And on the road, I try to find fresh juice wherever I can.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Individuality

It’s why real men just go out in the woods and howl. I must do it and get paid.

I was happy to find out that when on tour, Dolly Parton doesn’t use hotels but stays on her bus every night, to the point of having her buses shipped from Austria to Australia so she can tour the way she sees fit. I used one of her buses once – an honor.

Now, if someone wants to spit on me, I just roll up the window of my BMW 540i.

I mean I appreciate fan mail and that the people like what I am doing but I can’t answer it. If I would answer 25 letters a day I would be just a guy answering mail and not an artist anymore.

Most of the people who call me a sellout were 7 when I was down face-first in the punk trenches.

I once asked Ozzy Osbourne, truly one of my favorite people in the world, if he was cool with singing Black Sabbath songs year after year, whether he was performing with Black Sabbath or out on a solo tour. He said it was great.

When you start to doubt yourself the real world will eat you alive.

To this day, my haircut is the number two clippers, which I apply to myself every month.

Having an identity is one thing. Being born into an identity is quite a different matter.

One person’s roar is another’s whine, just as one person’s music is another’s unendurable noise.

When you’re going into an employment environment that looks pretty scary, it is easy to lose your moral compass, your decency, your sense of civility and your sense of community.

I am an employment hyena. I am happy to make a meal of what the lions leave behind.

Questioning anything and everything, to me, is punk rock.

I believe that one defines oneself by reinvention. To not be like your parents. To not be like your friends. To be yourself. To cut yourself out of stone.

I think self-reliance and self-responsibility and self-accountability will help you as a parent, a teacher, as a citizen as a friend.

I just travel the world with my backpack and my cameras and a bunch of Clif bars.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Loneliness

Loneliness adds beauty to life. It puts a special burn on sunsets and makes night air smell better.

Yes, I guess you could say I am a loner, but I feel more lonely in a crowed room with boring people than I feel on my own.

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.

It’s sad when someone you know becomes someone you knew.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Passion

Maybe I’m just a psycho, and the stage is a better place to go than either the loony bin or somewhere else.

Being an artist is dragging your innermost feelings out, giving a piece of yourself, no matter in which art form, in which medium.

You need a little bit of insanity to do great things.

Change is hard, but change is good.

I love capitalism. It rewards me for being brave – it awards me for being innovative and thinking out of the box.

I’ve been on ‘Jay Leno,’ and everyone likes Jay, but being on that show is a really boring afternoon. I sincerely like Jay, but I wouldn’twant his job, because I’d have to interview Kathy Ireland, and there’s nothing there I’d want to know.

Musicians should not play music. Music should play musicians.

The only difference between me and others is that they think they can change something with cute little poems, nice cards or embracing trees and being nice to little lapdogs.

If I lose the light of the sun, I will write by candlelight, moonlight, no light, If I lose paper and ink, I will write in blood on forgotten walls. I will write always. I will capture nights all over the world and bring them to you.

I forged myself out of a vacuum. I crawl along the highway on hacked off stumps year after year. Some wonder how and why. I never do.

My motto is, ‘Never quit.’

I am on until I am dead, like a light bulb.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Optimism

With any advent in technology, any technological innovation, there is the good and the bad.

Creating problems is easy. We do it all the time. Finding solutions, ones that last and produce good results, requires guts and care.

My optimism wears heavy boots and is loud.

Pizza makes me think that anything is possible.

I don’t believe in fate or destiny. I believe in various degrees of hatred, paranoia, and abandonment. However much of that gets heaped upon you doesn’t matter – it’s only a matter of how much you can take and what it does to you.

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.

I don’t think you’ll ever have a perfect world because we humans are prone to error, and so we’re always in search of an upgrade.

Hope is the last thing a person does before they are defeated.

There’s a lot of mountain climbers trapped inside of bodies of people behind the counter at Kinko’s.

When you are young, there is so much ahead of you, it’s like the Saharan desert. You can’t even see across it.

I don’t want to pass through life like a smooth plane ride.

I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Lying

I think it’s important to have some documentation of the past.

I have come to the conclusion that it’s a waste of time to have too much pride in anything. Perhaps it’s good to have a sense of duty, a jealous zeal to protect or improve, but pride ultimately is only that which stands vulnerable to offense and degradation.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Politics

I’m of the opinion that the Democrats have the ideas I agree with more often than not. Reenergizing the middle class and giving people a break.

Voting is completely important. People in America think democracy is a given. I think of it as an ecosystem, and what gets in the way of it is politicians and apathy.

I consider any gun that can chamber a round and send a projectile down its barrel at a high rate of speed into my body – causing me injury or death – to be an assault weapon.

If the Constitution was a movie, the Preamble would be the trailer, the First Amendment the establishing shot, the 13th the crowd pleaser and the 14th the ultimate hero scene.

The fact is, in the minds of many, Trayvon Martin received the appropriate punishment for a true crime: He was black, male and dared to walk outside. In life, young Trayvon was just a teenager; in death, he has been transformed into a scary, lurking, suspicious, prone-to-violence spook.

Smart people make good choices. They dig science and say ‘no’ to the invasion of sovereign nations for the pleasure of corporations.

Sarah Palin embarrasses herself almost immediately upon opening her mouth to speak or upon moving her fingers to send messages to her dull flock.

I think more tolerance, more people having more access to a chance to be literate, and a chance to stay healthy makes for a more peaceful planet.

The prison-industrial complex and the military-industrial complex are here with us and are multi-billion dollar enterprises. We can make more money off the kid in Compton if he’s a criminal instead of a scholar. It’s business.

There is not one single police officer in America that I am not afraid of and not one that I would trust to tell the truth or obey the laws they are sworn to uphold. I do not believe they protect me in any way.

Weakness is what brings ignorance, cheapness, racism, homophobia, desperation, cruelty, brutality, all these things that will keep a society chained to the ground, one foot nailed to the floor.

Marriage equality is a term so ridiculous on its face that when you hear it mentioned, you would think you were in Riyadh. Years from now, perhaps we can lose the equality part, the same-sex part and call it what it is – marriage.

I’ve been in Iraq, and it never occurred to me to go, ‘Hey, this war is bogus,’ to some guy who’s 24 hours a day trying not to get shot at or blown up.

It has been hard to get my head around how Justice Antonin Scalia rationalizes his decisions. His body blow to the Voting Rights Act was a head scratcher, but at least he was calm when he attempted to justify his odd logic.

Jazz music is as American as it gets, and so is the U.S. Postal Service. A Miles Davis stamp is a perfect marriage of two great American institutions.

Could it be that violence is as much a part of the American identity as the Constitution, and a vital component to its economic stability?

Guns are part of the American identity.

I am a veteran of the War on Christmas. I am just emerging from a battlefield strewn with dead trees and torn shreds of brightly colored wrapping paper.

I have healthy disagreements with political parties I’m not aligned with, but I don’t think it should be to the point where we’re cursing and trying to strangle each other.

‘Fox News’ will one day come to an end. Led Zeppelin will not. It’s as simple as that.

Russia is tough. The history, the land, the people – brutal.

We Californians can watch the Weather Channel for images of winter’s brutality unleashed upon our fellow Americans and thank our lucky stars we don’t have to contend with it.

Before any American points a finger at President Putin and calls him nasty names, they should recognize that a lot of Americans agree with Putin on his stance against homosexual and transgender people.

The public library system of the United States is worth preserving.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Autumn

We know that in September, we will wander through the warm winds of summer’s wreckage. We will welcome summer’s ghost.

August used to be a sad month for me. As the days went on, the thought of school starting weighed heavily upon my young frame. That, coupled with the oppressive heat and humidity of my native Washington, D.C., only seemed to heighten the misery.

In winter, I plot and plan. In spring, I move.

The month of November makes me feel that life is passing more quickly. In an effort to slow it down, I try to fill the hours more meaningfully.

August brings into sharp focus and a furious boil everything I’ve been listening to in the late spring and summer.

I have come to regard November as the older, harder man’s October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer’s death as winter tightens its grip.

August, the summer’s last messenger of misery, is a hollow actor.

Henry Rollins Quotes On Pain

I think about the meaning of pain. Pain is personal. It really belongs to the one feeling it. Probably the only thing that is your own. I like mine.

We all learn lessons in life. Some stick, some don’t. I have always learned more from rejection and failure than from acceptance and success.

I think that humans have a huge capacity to carry pain and sadness. There are things that haunt us our entire lives; we are unable to let them go. The good times seem almost effervescent and dreamlike in comparison with the times that didn’t go so well.