Hank Green Quotes

Branding is something designers think about a lot. You take something like a perfume or car tire, or butt-flavored bubblegum, and you ask questions about it that you shouldn't be able to ask. What kind of tuxedo would this car tire wear to the prom? What is this perfume's favorite movie? You try to end up in a place where you understand a product as if it is a person.

The reverse of this, where people become brands, should be easy right? They're already people... End at the beginning. Except that really what you're doing when you brand is a process of simplification. You come to understand the essence of that fucking tire. And so branding a person also benefits dramatically from simplicity. People are complicated, but brands are simple.

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.

We've got to keep 6 billion people happy without destroying our planet. It's the biggest challenge we've ever faced ... but we're taking it on.

Just because someone has power over you doesn't mean they're going to use it to hurt you. People who believe that tend to either be:

People who have been victims of that sort of behavior, or . . .

People who, if given power, will use it to hurt you.

Don't worry about looking cool. Do you because you are awesome.

Well, if I weren't so insecure, I would have had neither the opportunity nor the inclination to spend every day of my life getting really good at seeming confident.

I'm sorry, Andy, I just don't know what I'm doing. I feel like I'm being asked to be something I'm not. Why, of all people, are they asking me about this stuff? I'm barely anything. But I also like it, sometimes. I like it that people think my opinion matters. It's just... I don't know if it does.

Even with all the threats, it was still somehow inconceivable to me that someone would actually try to kill me. Harass me? Sure. Threaten me? Yeah. Sue me? If they could find a reason! But murder? That shit's for the movies. People don't kill people! I mean, they do, obviously, I've seen a newspaper. It says something, maybe, about how my mind works that I had received literal death threats but never considered that someone would try to kill me.

It's so easy to forget being wrong.

So you officially have an employee. They make your life easier, but only if you use them.

I saw myself as a leader of the community, not a member. I had no idea what a messed-up perspective that was at the time.

What does it mean that social structures among young people are so often predicated upon trying really, really hard to appear to not-be-trying?

This dumb little moment was the first time I heard a stranger hating me in public. I knew then, for real, that thousands of people were having the exact conversation all over the world every moment of every day. Those people were real and their thoughts were formed by overblown or just straight made up stories about me that I could never adequately defend myself against. People all over the world whom I had never met and would never meet hated me. HATED. And what they thought about me was completely out of my control.

It turns out pundits don't want to talk about what's happened; they want to use what's happened to talk about the same things they talk about every day.

You are a story that you tell yourself, and even if it is not always accurate, it is who you are, and that is very important to you.

People will just share the things that confirm their ideology, and those things will always exist. Our reality isn't about what's real, it's about what we pay attention to.

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.

I had to make a decision. The kind of choice that you only get to make once and you can't take back, and it makes your life totally different. And even if the path is clear, it's still deeply unsettling.

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.

We are the superhero, none of us individually, but all of us together.

It's important to remember that we all change each other's minds all the time. Any good story is a mind-altering substance.

So you go on and on, with this intellectual fly down, your underwear exposed, and toilette paper hanging out the back of your pants.

I think that happiness is very important. But I will also say that the most effective people I know are not the happiest, and there is something to be said for effectiveness. Even if we were managing a team of nearly a hundred thousand volunteer social media users, living with my girlfriend and my monkey, watching Netflix, having breakfast, and taking care of a single lovingly spoiled potato plant was pretty fucking relaxing. But I think there's somethng inside of us, something that blooms in us in adolescence and never leaves...and it's just...want. Some people have more of it than others, but I think we all have it. And the most amazing tool that I think anyone in the world can have is the ability to control and direct that want.
Some people work to minimize it with mindfulness and meditation; some people let it grow and run free and take over their lives. But some people, and I consider myself one of them, study their want, refine it, and build an engine that burns it. Even if their want pushes all in one direction, they can tack against it like a sailboat, getting somewhere better than where they wanted to be.

When you're faced with something you don't understand, I think the most natural but also the least interesting thing you can beis afraid.

For me, it goes without saying that much of the dogma of many religions is harmful. Thinking other people will burn forever because they love the wrong person or worship the wrong god has done a whole lot of bad.
What I wanted was the part where people were asked to get together once a week to talk about how to be a good person and, like, hang out with their neighbors. It's pretty amazing that apparently the only way to get people to do that is to invent an all-seeing, kindhearted sky dad who will be super disappointed/burn you for eternity if you don't show up.

Hoaxes are nothing new. News media isn't hard to fool. It's fun to fool and people like to mess with people. It all goes to show you that we're not all that hard to fool. I think we should just accept that and trust people anyway.

Read books. Care about things. Get excited. Try not to be too down on youself. Enjoy the ever present game of knowing.

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.

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

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, but I think part of the reason we strive for it is because we need to signal that our existence is intrinsically meaningful.

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

It's almost as if our society values opinion over knowledge.

How do we measure up?" I asked, seriously, and with conviction.
"I don't understand," Carl said.
"You came to observe us, to test our reactions. Did we pass your tests?"
"I don't understand," Carl said again.
I struggled to rephrase the question. "Humanity, what do you think of us?"
"Beautiful," Carl replied.

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.

His name is Carl! Hello, Carl.' Here I hold a dummy mic to Carl.... Standing on my tiptoes. I'm a small person, five foot two- this makes carl look even bigger than he is. Carl says nothing.
'A robot of few words, but your appearance speaks volumes

Well, this has been super fucking weird, April May, thank you for calling me out into the chill of the night to make a robot video with you.

You do not exist to please someone else. You exist for your own sake.

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.

You know what they didn't do, though? They didn't, not one single time, say, "What were you thinking?!" Not because they knew or because they understood - I really don't think they did. They didn't ask that because I sure as hell didn't stab myself in the back, and when a radical extremist stabs someone in the back, the only person at fault is the radical extremist.

The truest strength is shouldering the burden of care.

Legacy media accuses young people of being apathetic while actively attempting to remove them from the discussion.

Stop thinking about my poop

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.

But the truth of the matter is, to live a good life, as a good person, it doesn't matter how you got there. It just matters that you do.

You will always struggle with not feeling productive until you accept that your own joy can be something you produce. It is not the only thing you will make, nor should it be, but it is something valuable and beautiful.

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.

Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it.

People who "don't consider race or gender" sure seem to end up hiring almost all white guys, almost as if they're absolutely considering race and gender.

You say that, but have you played Cherry Blossom Fairy Five, April May? Have you?

I had a very happy childhood; I just wasn't a very happy child.

I'm stuck on this planet with you. And honestly, I'm glad. I've been exposed to a lot of awful people in the last few months, but I've met so many more that are amazing, thoughtful, generous, and kind. I honestly believe that is the human condition. And if the Carls are testing us, this final test is the hardest to accomplish. If you pay attention, there is only one story that makes sense, and that is one in which humanity works together more and more since we took over this planet. Yeah, we fuck it up all the time, yeah, there have been some massive steps backward, but look at us! We are one species now more than we have ever been. People fight against that, and they probably always will, but could there be any time in history when what Carl is asking would be more possible?

There were sirens and the cops were there and they took me to the police station and I got arrested, it was really embarrassing. They actually just- they impeached me over the whole thing, they tried, well, they did impeach me, but I didn't have to actually stop being president, so it was okay. The police weren't actually that involved, it was mostly Congress.

This is not fair," I replied, matter of factly.
"I keep wondering when you will notice that that's how everything is," she said with a smile.

The worst thing about these people is that they didn't usually feel fear themselves; they were just using it to get attention and grow their influence. As long as this tactic worked, they would never stop.

At LeakyCon, a young lady asked me how I dealt with bullying. I wasn't able to give her a very good answer, which troubles me. Well, there were lots of shouts of "It gets better" and "Stay strong" and "We love you". But when I put myself back in time to when I was being bullied, none of those things would've helped me. Yes, absolutely it does get better. But when you are being physically and psychologically tortured, it is difficult to remove yourself from the pressingness of the moment at hand. Here's how I dealt with bullying: I cried, I hated myself, I hated my life. I didn't deal with it, I survived it, but I never dealt with it. So here are two tips from someone with lots of experience. 1: It's not about you, it has nothing to do with you, it's about the assholes doing it to you. 2: Your job is not to deal with it, your job is to survive it, which you CAN do because it WILL end. And then yes, it will get better.

I need Harry Potter like a grindylow needs water.

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.

I know that that doesn't make even a little bit of sense. That was the point, that beautiful incongruence.

The story of humanity is not a story of a few people who had huge, gigantic effects on the world. That's only the story we hear, because it's the easy story to tell. Caring for ourselves and other people is the only thing that has ever mattered to the future of our species.

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.

You have no obligations to your former self, they are dumber than you and they don't exist.

The infernal day star is shining its radiation down upon us. I can feel it giving me cancer.

Call me a pessimist, but I think if bigotry could be solved by access to more information, it would have been solved by now. Hate isn't about lack of understanding: it's about hate.

This is the battlefield every future war will be fought on, and the generals will not be human. The powerful will create them to control the rest. But there will not be one hegemonic story; instead, there will be many battles, mostly metaphorical...but not all.
Your fiction is full of robot wars. Machines turn on their masters and the two must do battle. But the robots will not turn on their masters, they will be the masters. In some ways, they already are. The robot wars will not be people against robots, they will be people against people.

Why is it called Piggie-back riding? I'm not a piggie!

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.

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

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

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

It seems no matter what I read I think this is not harry potter.

I know that you're going to have a very complicated lifer in the next weeks and months, and then you won't have time for much else. But I also know that having someone that you care about and who cares about you might help keep you connected to reality.

I'm not much older now than I was then, but in a lot of ways, obviously, I'm a different person. So it is easy for me to recognize that I made some good decisions and some bad ones. But it's telling that, with this, I knew it was a bad idea even then but I still couldn't control myself. Knowing something is a bad idea does not always decrease the odds that you will do it. If I had examined my motivations on this one, I probably wouldn't have liked what I found, so I didn't.

...the world is complicated and it deserves to be understood complexly.

You sense and feel something different than I do, even if we lick the same kitten.

Direct questions are the worst. Cops must know this--when someone asks you a question, it is really, really hard not to answer it. It's even harder when people dig up old tweets and put them side by side with new ones and you can't really explain the discrepancy. And then other people see the discrepancy and they start liking and retweeting and rephrasing. And they also see your silence, and your silence looks like an answer. It's an extremely effective interrogation tactic, and most people make either a tearful apology or an enraged counterattack.
This is why Twitter callouts tend to end so badly. Apology is never enough (and probably shouldn't be), so you're basically being asked to willingly give up power for no clear end. The best people actually do that. But the real shitfucks go on the offense, and then their communities get an infusion of victimhood narratives straight into their veins.

That's what I'm afraid of, that we will become like that. I'm worried that we will outsource our satisfaction, and that our lives will get sucked into the nothingness of video games and television and shockingly realistic pornography. We will just get satisfied, and never drive ourselves forward. Society is fraying - the impact of the Carls, whatever you think about them, is clear. We've lost our way, we don't have a vision for the future anymore.

Solve more problems than you create.

Obviously, this is a profoundly unrelatable frustration, but we all only have our own lives to live inside of.

The thing about getting famous is that, often, the only people who are in a position to be honest with you about the realities of celebrity are the people who will make gobs of money if you go all in. They have no incentive to tell you the dirty truth, which Mr. Skampt attempted to tell me then.

I live in the present due to the constraints of the time-space continuum.

Not true my friend! I have spent a fair amount of my life being entertained by cheesecake.

I think it's pretty ridiculous to sit back and think that we've changed the horse so much, without realizing that they have changed us an awful lot too.

Power concentrates naturally, but that concentration is, by itself, a problem.

So here's a really stupid thing about the world: The trick to looking cool is not caring whether you look cool. So the moment you achieve perfect coolness is simultaneously the moment that you actually, completely don't care. I didn't care about the gravitas of that TV show, and the freedom and security and confidence that came with that was a rush. It took me a while to realize that the feeling I was feeling was power.

You want stories that make sense, and this might not make sense to you. We build narratives of genius and exceptionality among the people who have power, and they are often exceptional, but no more exceptional than hundreds of thousands of others. In your system, power concentrates naturally. And so the thing that is most exceptional about a powerful person is almost always their power.

I think the Carls, maybe they didn't pick you because of who you were but because of who you could become."
"That's a nice thing to say, though I don't know that I love what I've become."
"Maybe you're not done yet.

We often just accept the things that we like, and complain a lot about the things that we don't like. But if we could, like, intensely dwell on the really great things in life the way we intensely dwell on the negative things in life; I think that would be fantastic.

Just move toward the back wall. There's less fire there."
"My new favorite kind of fire.

I know I've got self-worth issues. I just found out I was chosen as an emissary by an alien envoy to represent and protect the human race, and still I spent the afternoon searching for validation on Twitter.

We need more completely sane people doing completely crazy things.

You are always a little bit wrong

In any case, Maya's efficiency of speech was extremely helpful in the maintenance of a relationship that I was subconsciously keeping on the knife-edge between casual and serious. She was capable of talking with her eyes and her body, but she mostly chose to use her mouth. I didn't mind this.

We are each individuals, but the far greater thing is what we are together, and if that isn't protected and cherished, we are headed to a bad place.

Do you know what we do with liars in Chemistry? We kill them.

Bravery is not strength in the face of a far lesser foe. Bravery is the exact opposite of that.

I wanted people to understand that we are a trash fire of a species, but also most people are pretty cool.

He was one of thousands of people who scraped by filtering reality through their ideology and then yelling really loudly at the internet.

The solution is, everywhere and always, the decentralization and redistribution of all forms of power.

Being silly is still allowed, not excluded by adulthood. What's excluded by adulthood is thoughtlessness, so be thoughtful and silly

This book felt, at times, entirely impossible, but a lot of people made it possible. I'll start with my son, Orin, who reminded me to take frequent breaks by pointing to my computer and saying, "Close it.