Kathleen Hanna Quotes

I always wanted to play music, but my family was more interested in handing me paints and markers. Art was always my favorite subject in school, and I can remember staying up all night drawing as a small child. My expression via art was extremely strong as I grew and hasn't stopped.

I wanted to make something that I wanted to hear that I wasn't hearing.

If people are like, 'Oh, you're an icon,' then whatever. But who thinks of themselves like that? It's not like I have posters of myself on the wall.

Feminism rotates between backlash and interest. And the cool thing about the Internet is that it's allowing women more access to their own history. Part of the problem before the Internet was that we didn't know which books to read. Someone had to tell you.

I talked a lot early on in my career about intersectionality and how racism and classism and sexism and homophobia and capitalism are all connected with each other, and they're these crazy systems that are feeding on each other and are also damaging. I can't even go into the whole spectrum of it. But I feel like kids today are so much more savvy about that conversation. And I'm so thrilled when I get to meet younger people who are doing that so much better than I did.

I realized that calling yourself a feminist or not calling yourself a feminist, just by being in a band of all girls, it's all you talk about.

My advice for someone who wants to be creative but has a chronic illness is to think of something that you can do as opposed to all the things you can't do - and do that. It's just like gardening: What can grow in this soil? There's some soil you can grow roses in and some soil you can only grow cactuses in, so if you can only grow cactuses, become the best cactus grower in the whole world. Taking care of yourself is the most important thing. Find something that makes you happy. Don't get down on yourself that you can't run a 4K or dance all night long at a fun club. Give yourself a break.

I'm not going to sit around and be peace and love with somebody's boot on my neck.

I know that's really horrible, but that's how I do it in my head. I'm going to die. It doesn't matter. I don't matter. I'm a grain of sand. As a grain of sand, I may as well go out and relate to people and enjoy my short time on this planet that I have. Who knows what's coming next?

I'm really annoyed by the wave of country music that's just a list of stuff. It almost sounds like L.A. people writing country music, because it's just a list of stuff: 'My pickup truck and my cowboy boots and my Levi's jeans and my girlfriend with the short shorts.' It's so boring!

Everybody wasn't always wasted. Why is punk rock about getting wasted? Isn't it punk rock to be sober and change the world? I thought it was about challenging capitalism? How are you going to challenge capitalism if you're wasted?

I wouldn't want to play Miss Hannigan. I'm not a villain. She's mean to little children! I can't do that. That would disrupt my brand.

I didn't even know what the word lesbian meant until I was called one... and then I had to look it up in the dictionary.

Whatever your personality was before, an illness makes it that plus a thousand. I'm a very binary person in a bad way where it's like everything is either totally great or totally awful. I don't understand grey area that well, and I've been working at that.

I think as a culture, we don't like conflict or looking at icky stuff - especially in our downtime.

I'm a big proponent of open adoption, because it allows a relationship between the birth mother and her child so that the kid isn't like, "Where did I come from?" And to have it be like, "Look, you have a bunch of people who love you." Not just the parents who are raising you on a day-to-day basis, but also to have contact with your birth mother and hopefully your birth father. So that you can be like, "Oh, they love me too, and they love me so much that they knew they couldn't take care of me but they're still in my life to some extent."

Women didn't want to be on the stage with other women because they didn't want their bodies to be compared. They didn't want another female act opening for them because of this weird competitive and tokenistic attitude.

People are actually having conversations about "Is this sexist?"

Jason Mraz, and the new James Blunt song is the worst thing that has ever been created on the face of the earth.

Just because you're wearing a goofy hat doesn't make it performance art.

I think the [fan] access is complicated, because it brings wonderful things into my life, and it brings really negative things into my life. I just try to keep the negative stuff at arm's length. Laugh at it and walk away.

I saw a video on YouTube of a girl who had very similar reactions to late-stage Lyme disease as I did. And I thought it was crazy. And when I saw her basically have a seizure on camera that looked very much like my seizure I felt, "Oh my god. That's me." And so it was really important to me, and I said to Sini, 'We have to find some way to not just talk about Lyme disease, but to show it.

I always tell girls who say they want to start a band but don't have any talent, well, neither do I. I mean, I can carry a tune, but anyone who picks up a bass can figure it out. You don't have to have magic unicorn powers. You work at it, and you get better. It's like anything- You sit there and do it every day, and eventually you get good at it.

I wanted to say to myself as much as anyone else that we made art.

There's comedians who I consider extremely punk rock who I've seen do very political stand up in places where nobody wants to hear that. It's uncomfortable and scary and you realize it's the punkest performance you've ever witnessed.

While sexism hurts women most intimately, it also damages men severely.

I'm totally into Taylor Swift. I think she has super-clever lyrics, and I love that she writes her own music. Some of the themes she writes about are stuff I wish was there for me when I was in high school, and I'm so happy she really cares about her female fans. She's not catering to a male audience and is writing music for other girls.

There are people who view their feminism in different ways. I used to beat myself up if I didn't react to things like I was supposed to.

I feel like there's this weird thing that as a feminist band you get put in this role as ambassadors.

Sexism and racism and homophobia and classism are so naturalized. All these stereotypes make people think it's just normal that straight white men are getting all the breaks.

I would much rather be the obnoxious feminist girl than be complicit in my own dehumanization.