Henry Rollins Quotes

By ignoring a lot of American culture you can write more interesting stories. Unfortunately, if you were writing about America as it is, you'd be writing about a lot of people sitting in front of television sets.

In America, magic has never been an important part of peoples' lives.

My photography is often a sociological look at American culture, and it's been very well published in the U.K.

I think it's that thing of growing up all the time watching American movies and listening to American music. It hits you in a way that's a lot purer because you are not in that culture that you're watching.

For the most part, Americans speak of culture and politics as if they were two separate realms.

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S.

I'm raising kids, and so much of American culture sustains me and gives me things to think about and work on.

Popular culture is most powerful when it offers us a vision of how our society should look - or at least reproduces our reality.

The impact of black music and black art forms on American culture is really difficult to appreciate.

ETHNOMAGNETISM: The tendency of young people to live in emotionally demonstrative, more unrestrained ethnic neighborhoods: 'You wouldn't understand it there, mother - they hug where I live now.'

America is one long expectoration.

We don't grow up in vacuums. We grow up in societies.

I would say that Mickey Mouse has a greater influence on the American public than Shakespeare, Milton, Dante, Rabelais, Shostakovitch, Lenin, and/or Van Gogh. Which says 'What?' about the American Public. Disneyland remains the central attraction of Southern California, but the graveyard remains our reality.

I believe the public schools are the greatest cultural influence in this country.

We are all victims of culture.

It may sound weird, but I don't really look for culture, particularly in an American city.

In the Anthropology Club, as I understood it, you were permitted, if not required, to despise only one thing, and that was your own culture, that of the West.

We moved up to Oregon when I was eight, and I think the radical absence of Jewish life here might have strangely made me feel more Jewish. It's a contextual thing I guess.

If we aren’t prepared to be counter-cultural we aren’t ready to be Christians.

If the culture is so all pervasive that you can’t think outside of it, how are you making genuine choices?

I like the Americans for a great many reasons. I like them because even the modern thing called industrialism has not entirely destroyed in them the very ancient thing called democracy. I like them because they have a respect for work which really curbs the human tendency to snobbishness.

With American Gods I was trying very, very consciously - there was a level at which it was a little like trying to write a novel in French - you know, "this novel is to be written in American."

I sometimes think the contemporary white American is more culturally deprived than the Indian.

What is it with this American booty culture? It seems to me to be a form of obsession.

Social Science … led us to the fallacy that, since all men have their being in culture and as a result of culture, they owe a debt to that culture which even a lifetime of altruism could not repay.