Hank Green Quotes

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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? ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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

Just because you can't imagine something doesn't mean you can't do it. ~ Hank Green

I have very little patience for teachers who teach their students things that are wrong. ~ Hank Green

If you were a crayon, what color would you most like to make out with? ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

It's so easy to forget being wrong. ~ Hank Green

Stop thinking about my poop ~ Hank Green

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

So you're not saying Carl is a space alien."

"No, but I am saying it looks increasingly likely that the Carls weren't made by humans or by nature."

"So you are saying Carl is a space alien!" I started to freak out again. ~ Hank Green

I need Harry Potter like a grindylow needs water. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

The truest strength is shouldering the burden of care. ~ Hank Green

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 ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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

As is often the case, it was the easier choice to make, and the more difficult choice to live with. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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

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

Solve more problems than you create. ~ Hank Green

Every person who reads your book will be far more likely to be on your side. Books are the most intensive of all current media. People are willing to spend hours and hours with a book. ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

We all want to be in the room where it happens, we want to be part of the things that matter to us, but no two people have the exact same collection of things that matter. Nowadays, I don't so much want to be in the room where it happens, but I do really want to help other people choose the right rooms, and help them realize that they really are a part of things that matter. Because when we feel like none of the rooms we are in matter, that's when we're really lost. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

Sometimes it seems to me that the purpose of life is to convert energy into beauty. And I know that's not rationally true. But sometimes it's okay for things not to be rationally true. ~ Hank Green

Did you see a large robotic hand run by here just now?" I said, having caught enough of my breath to speak.
"Hmm?" he said, as if he were just realizing we were talking to him. "Ah. Yes, it just went inside."
"What?"
"Well, it walked up and looked around as if it wanted to go inside, so I let it inside. It had not strictly obeyed the dress code, but while the rules are both specific and comprehensive, I thought it made sense to allow an exception in the case of an autonomous hand. ~ Hank Green

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

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

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

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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

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. ~ Hank Green

Imagine if you looked different to every person who saw you. Not, like, some people thought you were more or less attractive, but one person thinks you're a sixty-five-year-old cowboy from Wyoming complete with boots and hat and leathery skin, and the next person sees an eleven-year-old girl wearing a baseball uniform. You have no control over this, and what you look like has nothing to do with the life you have lived or even your genome. You have no idea what each person sees when they look at you. That's what fame is like. You think this sounds like beauty because we sometimes 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. Different people will have different opinions, and the only person who gets to decide if I'm attractive is the person looking at me. But then there is some consensus about what attractive is. Beauty is an attribute defined by human nature and culture. I can my eyes and my lips and my boobs when I look in a mirror. I know what I look like. Fame is not this way. A person's fame is in everyone's head except their own. You could be checking into your flight at the airport and 999 people will see you as just another face in the crowd. The thousandth might think you're more famous than Jesus. As you can imagine, this makes fame pretty disorienting. You never know who knows what. You never know if someone is looking at you because you went to college with them or because they've been watchi ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

Being annoyed by carefully crafted internet personas was part of my carefully crafted internet persona. ~ Hank Green

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

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

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

Making an un-perfect decision is far, far better than not making a decision, which is the worst possible decision you could make. ~ Hank Green

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

I forgot how to throw a boomerang, but then it came back to me. ~ Hank Green

What is reality except for the things that people universally experience the same way? ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

I'm stuck in a burning building. But more than that, 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 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 us would be more possible? Asking dozens of governments to take the same action simultaneously with an uncertain outcome? Or at least asking them to allow their citizens to take that action? ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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

Carl just had too much mass - we couldn't stop falling into his gravity any more than we could jump to the moon ~ Hank Green

Hank: This is my one beautiful existence, and over the course of my life I will spend years of my life watching television; years of my life pooping; years of my life on twitter. How ok is that? [...]

One thing that I really want to get away from is the idea that time is wasted when you are not producing something. [...]

John: I do think that there might be some value in asking yourself: "What do I want to do while I'm here? What do I want to do with my time?"

And part of the answer for that should, I think, be: "I want to distract myself from the pain of meaninglessness. ~ John Green

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

Radicalization follows fear and insecurity, and as dissatisfaction grew, fewer and fewer people were interested in my nuanced, chill takes. ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

Behold the field in which I grow my fucks. Lay thine eyes upon it and see that it is barren. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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

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. ~ Hank Green

No, I . . . I don't know, April! It's exciting, but space aliens are a very specific explanation for a very broad circumstance. There's more to the universe than humans and aliens. Maybe they're made by humans but sent from the future. Maybe they are a kind of projection through space-time. Maybe they're proof that our universe is a simulation and someone is changing the code. Mostly, I don't pretend an explanation is correct just because I haven't thought of any others that fit with current data. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green

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

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. ~ Hank Green

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. ~ Hank Green