QUOTES by Derrick Jensen
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"A very poor kid came up to me after a talk and said 'I want to go blow up a factory.' I asked how old he was and he said 17. I said 'have you ever had sex?' He said 'no.' I said 'just remember if you get caught you aren't going to have sex for twenty years at least.' That's not saying that one person having sex is worth the salmon. I'm not saying it's a reason not to act, I'm saying don't be stupid."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"By deafening ourselves to the emotional consequences of violence we have become confused by its relationship to sex. We have come to believe that violence equals aggression, and we have come to base our model of sexuality on our model of violence... converting an act of aggression into an act of consensual sexuality."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"To reverse the effects of civilization would destroy the dreams of a lot of people. There's no way around it. We can talk all we want about sustainability, but there's a sense in which it doesn't matter that these people's dreams are based on, embedded in, intertwined with, and formed by an inherently destructive economic and social system. Their dreams are still their dreams. What right do I -- or does anyone else -- have to destroy them. At the same time, what right do they have to destroy the world?"
Quote by -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?"
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"Casey Maddox wrote that when philosophy dies, action begins. I would say in addition that when we stop hoping for external assistance, when we stop hoping that the awful situation we're in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free - truly free - to honestly start working to thoroughly resolve it. I would say when hope dies, action begins."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"If we celebrate life with all its contradictions, embrace, experience, and ultimately live with it, a chance exists for a spiritual life filled not only with pain and untidiness, but also with joy, community, and creativity."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings - as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture - but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?"
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam."
Quote by -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."
Quote by -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."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance"
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"I'm frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles or fantasies."
Quote by -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."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world."
Quote by -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."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"If you only had a limited time to life (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time?"
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I'm not sure that's right"
Quote by -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."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely to step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?"
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet,"
Quote by -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."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labour beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"A wonderful thing happens when you give up on hope, which is that you realize you never needed it in the first place. You realize that giving up on hope doesn't kill you, nor did it make you less effective. In fact it made you more effective, because you ceased relying on someone or something else to solve your problems - you ceased hoping your problems somehow get solved, through the magical assistance of God, the Great Mother, the Sierra Club, valiant tree-sitters, brave salmon, or even the Earth itself - and you just began doing what's necessary to solve your problems yourself."
Quote by -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."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"In sum, one of the primary things I learned was how to kill time. I learned also to wish away my life. I learned to give myself away."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned."
Quote by -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."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen
"I no longer see Descartes' statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture's narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body."
Quote by -Derrick Jensen