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I am an optimist because I want to change things for the better and I know that blood has to be spilled and disharmony and cruelty are necessary to do that.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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To our enemies all over the world who plan America's demise, please take my advice. Give up now. No matter what, you will lose. You will lose it all.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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There are religions and social and moral awareness in any society that gets passed immediately. Those human truths. All cultures address them.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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To my ears, jazz sounds better in warm weather and after the sun has gone down. While I will listen to some of my favorite jazz records in cooler weather, it's the warmer nights that really make them come alive. Something about those sounds and the heat of the night really makes it happen for me.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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At times, I feel America is something that I can actually put my arms around, more than a land mass and a Constitution, something far more containable and understandable. I don't exactly know what it is, but at these times I feel completely woven into it.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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Everything I do, writing, touring, travelling, it all comes from the punk and hardcore attitude, from that expression - from being open to try things but relying on yourself, taking what you have into the battle and making of it what you will, hoping you can figure it out as you go. Make some sense of it.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I beg young people to travel. If you don't have a passport, get one. Take a summer, get a backpack and go to Delhi, go to Saigon, go to Bangkok, go to Kenya. Have your mind blown. Eat interesting food. Dig some interesting people. Have an adventure. Be careful. Come back and you're going to see your country differently, you're going to see your president differently, no matter who it is. Music, culture, food, water. Your showers will become shorter. You're going to get a sense of what globalization looks like.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I have come to regard November as the older, harder man's October. I appreciate the early darkness and cooler temperatures. It puts my mind in a different place than October. It is a month for a quieter, slightly more subdued celebration of summer's death as winter tightens its grip.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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Sometimes I would get invited to a party or to go out to dinner by one of them and I would decline. Part of me wanted to go, but those kind of outings always made me feel even more alienated than usual. Hearing them talk made me feel lonely and hateful at the same time. Lonely because I didn't fit in, never did. When I was reminded, it hurt. And hateful because it reaffirmed what I already knew, that I was alone and on the outside.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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Too sick and freaked out not to want a bullet for every passer by, too sick and freaked out to breathe, too sick and freaked out to care, too sick and freaked out to think of anything but the annihilation of my mind and denial of my life. So sick and freaked out that I think everyone is my friend.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I come from a minimum wage working world, as we all did for at least some part of our lives, and that is never out of my rearview. I've never forgotten how much your feet hurt after you've stood on them for like 12 hours. And how the drudgery of a job you hate craps on your entire life; how you treat other people, how you treat yourself, and it really was getting to me.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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Rarely do I do film press because I'm so low on the food chain of the movie, and for me it's just this thing I did for four weeks before the next tour started.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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If you are a kid in Beverly Hills, (I am not putting down people who live in Beverly Hills) if that kid knows private school and a credit card... you can't say the kid is taking life for granted. He is taking the life that was given to him.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I am a veteran of the War on Christmas. I am just emerging from a battlefield strewn with dead trees and torn shreds of brightly colored wrapping paper.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I can tell you exactly where the economy is going. It's going to China, Honduras, Guatemala, Cambodia, Vietnam, Cipan, and any other place where you can pay people peanuts and have them work like dogs.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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George Zimmerman is a foot soldier in a rapidly privatizing country. He is a new centurion of 21st-century America. Law enforcement is tied down by the strictures of, well, the law. There is only 'so much they can do' to take care of the 'problem.'
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I could fall in love with a cruel desert that kills without passion, a canyon full of scorpions, one thousand blinding arctic storms, a century sealed in a cave, a river of molten salt flowing down my throat. But never with you.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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The R.E.M and Nirvana successes don't mean much to me except as a potential distraction for bands who want to cash in on the trend. Don't try to sound like someone else. R.E.M and Nirvana don't sound like anyone else.
Greg Ginn Black Flag
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The bible saw that can get a lot of people killed, so let's try and steer people away from that. I am not an expert on the bible. I am just saying.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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Most of the people who call me a sellout were 7 when I was down face-first in the punk trenches.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I don't need music for the good times. I don't have that kind of need. Music doesn't serve me like that.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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The average is the borderline that keeps mere men in their place. Those who step over the line are heroes by the very act. Go.
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I have to keep moving I don't want to think I'm going to work all day today I don't want to stop Don't want to let my brain catch up my thoughts How will I be able to tell them that I'm a shadow A grey patch of cold rotting life
Henry Rollins Black Flag
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I'm not out here on the front lines trying to create clones, or consumers, or worshippers of who I am, and what I do. I'm trying to nurture the idea that you should do your own thing, which is really powerful.
Mike Vallely Black Flag
