Top Derrick Jensen Quotes - Quotesmemo.com

Derrick Jensen Biography

Derrick Jensen (born December 19, 1960) is an American author and radical environmentalist (and prominent critic of mainstream environmentalism) living in Crescent City, California. According to Democracy Now!, Jensen "has been called the poet-philosopher of the ecological movement."

Read about Derrick Jensen in Wikipedia

Random Authors

Derrick Jensen Quotes

Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.

Layers, Lie, Lying, Onion, Onions

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?

Definitively, Love, Mean, Proved, Science, Trust

For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.

Deceit, Lying, Maintain, Necessary, Tell, Way

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.

Existence, Ifs, Man, Men, Necessary, Thing

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.

Children, Experiences, Reason, School, Thirteen, Years

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Economic, Eight, Important, Needs, Premise, World

To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity.

Anachronistically, Believe, Slavery, Think, Thinking

Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.

Believe, Destructive, Government, Protect, Run, Running

We must learn how to think like the planet.

Learn, Like, Planet, Planets, Think, Thinking

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.

Love, Majority, Reading, Sleep, Thinking, Waking

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.

Children, Ferocity, Mean, Suicide

All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.

Complete, Corporations, Planet, Simple, Straightforward, Suffering Of Others

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?

Civilization, Dream, Dreams, People, Sense, Time

A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.

Enforce, Green, Lots, Paper, Police, Purpose

Slavery was a central concern of governance form the time of the first nation-state. The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest know set of laws for governing an empire, prescribed death for anyone who harbored a fugitive or otherwise helped a slave to escape. The relationship between the law and bondage goes back even farther: Indeed, the oldest extant legal documents don't concern the sale of land, houses, or even animals, but slaves.

Animal, Farther, Governance, Land, Law, Oldest

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.

Example, Integrity, Role, Roles, Systems

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?

Beings, Coyotes, Honeybees, Loved, Salmon, Stars

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.

Expense, Giving, Interior, Long, Spring, Time

We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.

Environmental, Kind, Killing, Insanely, Inexcusably

Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.

Civilization, Sustainable

1