Henry Rollins Quotes

I don't think Israel's becoming more religious, I think its politics is becoming more religious. There's a difference.

Most of the Palestinians don't understand what they're doing... Politically, people can say what they want. The problem is not political, but religious.

It is important that social, political, and religious freedoms grow in China. A society which recognizes religious freedom is a society which will recognize political freedom as well.

Liberty means that a man is recognized as free and treated as free by those who surround him.

I think that today, faith drives so much of our politics, that I thought, "If you don't talk about it, you are missing a whole big part of what is going on politically."

The most important thing in this world is liberty. More important than food or clothes - more important than gold or houses or lands - more important than art or science - more important than all religions, is the liberty of man.

I should like one of these days to be so well known, so popular, so celebrated, so famous, that it would permit me . . . to break wind in society, and society would think it a most natural thing.

Worst of all, however, is the devastation wrought by the misuse of religious conviction for political ends. In truth, we cannot sharply enough attack those wretched crooks who would like to make religion an implement to perform political or rather business services for them.

A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms. But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.

What a free society offers to the individual is much more than what he would be able to do if only he were free.

Religious freedom is a fundamental human right.

Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another, and in so far as it tends to exist with the freedom of all according to a universal law, it is the one sole original inborn right belonging to every man in virtue of his humanity.

Corporate and political and religious psychopaths ruin economies. They ruin societies.

The fact that some people are opposed on religious grounds mainly, well, that doesn't bother me as long as they're not allowed to influence other people by force or by whatever other means.

I think that in free societies, and we're constantly talking about living in free societies, aren't we, in contradiction with unhappy people who live in non-free societies, that the benefit, the dividend of living in a free society is that you say what you think.

Constitutional rights are useful up to a point, but they do not serve to guarantee much more than what could be called the bourgeois conception of freedom. According to the bourgeois conception, a "free" man is essentially an element of a social machine and has only a certain set of prescribed and delimited freedoms; freedoms that are designed to serve the needs of the social machine more than those of the individual.

The backwardness of our religious and social developments is undoubtedly holding back the development of the intellectual and political levels.

I think it was interesting to be steeped in that [political] world.

The union of Church and State is not to make the Church political, but the State religious.

I can think of no greater disaster to this country than to have the voters of it divide upon religious lines.

If what is best in mankind, and what its progress depends on, manifests itself primarily in the individual and only secondarily in the mass, then our objectives should be to maintain such freedom as allows the individual to think and speak for himself.

Being brought up very religious, I have a fear of people that look to idol gods. But we are idols and we're all gods, so to speak, and I think that celebrities should acknowledge their responsibility, because we are in a position to help.

I do not make decisions [as governor] based on what have I learned through my Bible studies, what have I learned in my religious classes in school. I'm a big believer in separation of church and state, and I think that's what . . . the law is.

In fact, because people are religious, they think they can do bad things.

The habit of the religious way of thinking has biased our mind so grievously that we are - terrified at ourselves in our nakedness and naturalness; it has degraded us so that we deem ourselves depraved by nature, born devils.