Kathleen Hanna Quotes - Page 2

So many women have experienced horrific forms of male violence throughout their lives, and why isn't there a song about how you get depressed because of it? And you don't know what to do, and you don't know how to talk to your friends and how weird it is to be a feminist in that situation, where there's sort of the expectation that you're super-strong superwoman but you're just, like, eating pizza in your house avoiding talking about it.

Just because I'm a woman doesn't mean I'm the same as every other female singer.

I feel so lucky that I met the love of my life. You know somebody's in it to win it when...you're having a seizure and they're holding you.

Every time I get sexually harassed, I'm supposed to turn around and yell at the person, but there are safety issues. Sometimes the best thing you can do it just walk right past that person and have a great day. But sometimes you feel like you really need to say something.

Find something that makes you happy, like looking at beautiful pictures, or, if you're able, listening to beautiful music, or sitting by the window and looking outside - small things like that can be absolutely huge.

It feels amazing and beautiful that music can have such an importance on the way that people form social groups. Music can change people. People can change the world.

I always get ‘What’s wrong?’ or ‘Lighten up.’ Half the time, when guys tell me to smile, I’m not even frowning, I’m thinking! Then I’m like, Oh! Some men don’t want women to think! Do they all have walkie-talkies? Are they all in this together? Like, ‘OK, she’s thinking, someone say something. She’s reading, go distract her.’ It starts feeling like that sometimes, doesn’t it?

When I get stressed out my de-stress default is - not cat videos - but I just watch his surrogates. They're so entertaining. It's like escapees from the Nordstrom cosmetics counter.

What I've heard from younger women and women my age is that the albums changed their lives or it was the first time they had heard feminism that they could relate to. So that's great.

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.

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 don't think I've ever had a woman yell that at me, but women have yelled mean things at me as well.

I was never trying to be the voice for anybody else. I was just trying to sing about what I was going through, and was singing about those things specifically because I knew there was an audience not being served.

People can be in a prison of their own mind. [There are] people who don't have their hearts open to other people's ideas, and can't listen to other people's ideas without feeling like they're being slapped in the face. Those people are more in a prison.

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 just working and having a good time and seeing what develops, which is so awesome, because you don't know what's going to happen, and I'm letting myself do that a lot more than I ever have.

Younger feminists actually care about stuff that came before them, the same way that I totally cared about and loved and felt so lucky to have access to the feminism that came before me. To have younger people take what me and my friends have done, and to say 'We have access to that, but we're going to put that through our own Internet generation filter and we're going to make it into something that speaks to us and is a lot smarter.'

My vision of punk rock was these dudes who were spitting on the audience and moshing. That's why I kind of left that scene. Then I see all these people around my same age or between 17 and 25 that were making music themselves in their own town. They weren't just singing, but creating. I see them putting out this music where there are tons of women involved in the scene and involved in the bands.

Clearly, gay marriage is on the top of the agenda right now. It's pretty amazing, considering where stuff was at when I was in high-school, when there were no LGBT Gay-Straight Alliances or any of that stuff. Am I a huge Lady Gaga fan? No, but I think some of the stuff she does that helps LGBT kids is amazing. And it's great that that's mainstream. It's fantastic that there's a pop star who's willing to put herself out in that way.

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

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 hate the attitude of, 'oh we already have a Lydia Lunch, so we do we need a Bikini Kill.' Well, there's like 2 hundered million all-male bands writting 'baby baby I love you, let me drag you around on my ankle.' Is that enough already? Duh!

My mom was a housewife, and wasn't somebody that people would think of as a feminist, and when Ms. Magazine came out we were incredibly inspired by it. I used to cut pictures out of it and make posters that said, "Girls can do anything", and stuff like that, and my mom was inspired to work at a basement of a church doing anti-domestic violence work. Then she took me to the Soidarity Day thing, and it was the first time I had ever been in a big crowd of women yelling, and it really made me want to do it forever.

I like loud snare, and I like really treble-y guitars, and that's just never going to change.

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."