Henry Rollins Quotes

I love being an American, and it's a beautiful country, but we are a bunch of whack jobs. We have got so much to learn.

When the Soviet Union fell, optimistic scholars believed the world had shifted inexorably in the direction of free markets and liberal democracy. Instead, the West gradually embraced bigger government and weaker social bonds, creating a fragmented society in which the only thing we all belong to, as President Barack Obama puts it, is the state.

The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret. Every year, without making a sound, three Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched teeth.

But someone like Claude Chabrol tries to make a connection between the society in which we live and the social reasons which make monsters out of some people.

It is organized violence on top which creates individual violence at the bottom.

Violence of the state is sublimated—it takes a very dull form.

Violence is a commodity in the U. S. and the culture of violence is toxic.

The level of destruction and terror and violence carried out by the powerful states far exceeds anything that can imaginably can be done by groups that are called terrorists and subnational groups.

To be an American is to be indoctrinated with racism, violence, capitalism and manifest destiny, the principles upon which the land of the free was founded.

I've told the kids in the ghettos that violence won't solve their problems, but then they ask me, and rightly so; "Why does the government use massive doses of violence to bring about the change it wants in the world?" After this I knew that I could no longer speak against the violence in the ghettos without also speaking against the violence of my government.

We live in a society and a culture and an economic model that tries to make everything look right.

The fact that slavery is written into the Constitution is about as entrenched a form of classism as you could possibly imagine.

The trouble with the profit system has always been that it was highly unprofitable to most people.

There are a lot of bleeding hearts around who just don’t like to see people with helmets and guns. All I can say is go and bleed … It is more important to keep law and order in society than to be worried about weak-kneed people …

Our greatest political disease -- the disease of thinking that the community is divided into the relatively rich and the relatively idle, and the laborious poor, and that every social and political controversy can be resolved into the question: What side are you on?

They [the people] are offered the Constitution. But the people can't eat the Constitution.

U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stock quotations …a public library full of old newspapers and dog-eared history books with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world’s greatest river valley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a set of big-mouthed officials with too many bank accounts. U. S. A is a lot of men buried in their uniforms in Arlington Cemetery. U. S. A. is the letters at the end of the address when you are away from home. But mostly U. S. A. is the speech of the people.

I can hire one half of the working class to kill the other half.

When twenty years ago a vague terror went over the earth and the word socialism began to be heard, I thought and still think that fear was translated into doctrines that had no proper place in the Constitution or the common law.

Our society makes profit out of violence

Militarism is, as all International Congresses have declared, the natural and unavoidable result of the capitalist regime, based on the class struggle, and that this militarism cannot be abolished without abolishing its source, the capitalist regime

Choose equality …. Inequality has the natural and necessary effect … of materializing our upper class, vulgarizing our middle class, and brutalizing our lower class.

Triumphant capitalism has unleashed a powerful drive toward inequality, not improvement, in the social sphere.

Conservatives are fond of telling us what a wonderful, happy, prosperous nation this is. The only thing that matches their love of country is the remarkable indifference they show toward the people who live in it.

The few who understand the system [of banking with capitalism] will either be so interested in its profits or be so dependent upon its favors that there will be no opposition from that class, while on the other hand, the great body of people, mentally incapable of comprehending the tremendous advantage that capital derives from the system, will bear its burdens without complaint, and perhaps without even suspecting that the system is inimical to their interests