Derrick Jensen Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“I've since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“We must learn how to think like the planet.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“Question four: What book would you give to every child? Answer: I wouldn't give them a book. Books are part of the problem: this strange belief that a tree has nothing to say until it is murdered, its flesh pulped, and then (human) people stain this flesh with words. I would take children outside and put them face to face with chipmunks, dragonflies, tadpoles, hummingbirds, stones, rivers, trees, crawdads. That said, if you're going to force me to give them a book, it would be The Wind In The Willows, which I hope would remind them to go outside.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“We can follow the example of those who remembered that the role of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much integrity as possible, but rather to confront and take down those systems.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“It's no wonder we don't defend the land where we live. We don't live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists...”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“You can rarely prove something to someone who does not want to see it proven, and even more to the point, you can almost never prove something to someone who has financial or ideological reasons to not see it proven.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don't, people with guns come and force us to pay. That's violent.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet,”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends.”
-- Derrick Jensen -
“Have you ever felt love? Did you need scientific proof of this? How would you have definitively and scientifically proved your love existed? If you could not prove it, would that mean your love didn't exist? What would you trust: your own feelings, or science?”
-- Derrick Jensen
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