Henry Rollins Quotes

My mother helped me identify myself the way the world would identify me. Bloodlines didn't matter as much as how I would be perceived.

There's no such thing as identity: it's something we have to believe in to make life more tolerable.

Our identities really are a constant negotiation between the story we tell about ourselves and the narrative our societies like to recite.

We are undermining a generation's happiness by depriving them of national identity, religious identity, and gender identity

My mama told me it's not what they call you - it's what you answer to.

I am an African-American in America. That will never change. But I don't have to be defined by that.

I must be very clear in one thing... Being a pageant girl is not who I am or what defines me.

Your ethnic or sexual identity, what region of the country you're from, what your class is - those aspects of your identity are not the same as your aesthetic identity.

You have to want to be Chicano to be Chicano.

The question of boundaries is a major question of the Jewish people because the Jews are the great experts of crossing boundaries. They have a sense of identity inside themselves that doesn't permit them to cross boundaries with other people.

My mom really raised me, so I took her name before I ever thought about having a career. It was for personal reasons. My birth name is actually Max Deitch.

Identity in America is complicated but it's also simple: it's about whom you identify with and who identifies with you.

I find it endlessly interesting, endlessly funny, the fact that we're rather arbitrarily divided up into these discrete humans and that your physical self, your physical attributes, your moment of history and the place where you were born determine who you are as much as all that indefinable stuff that's inside of you.

Fighting for identity is something that is very much in my life.

I was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.

I try not to define myself. Other people are going to do that for you anyway.

Do not let where you come from define you, but never forget the values you learned from your close community.

It's important that people understand who I am and where I come from and not just have it shaped by purely political discourse.

It's one of the hardest things in life - choosing your own name.

A people must have dignity and identity.

I suppose it's fair to say that I am interested in the invention of self or selves. We're all born into certain circumstances with particular physical traits, unique developmental experiences, geographical and historical contexts.

I don't decide to represent anything except myself. But that self is full of collective memory.

I am whatever you say I am; if I wasn't, then why would you say I am.

The first half of life is spent mainly in finding out who we are through seeing ourselves in our interaction with others.

I think I started writing about identity, and I used to believe that identity is the story. But now I'm not so much subscribed to that. I mean, with 'Mr. Fox,' it has a feminist agenda as well. And so, as I sort of been away from writing about identity, I still feel that kind of tug of roots and, you know, cultural background.