Top 87 Derrick Jensen Quotes
#1. So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law-made by those in power, to serve those in power-so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power.
Derrick Jensen
#2. Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.
Derrick Jensen
#3. We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.
Derrick Jensen
#4. 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?
Derrick Jensen
#5. This book is about fighting back. The dominant culture -civilization- is killing the planet, and it is long past time for those of us who care about life on earth to begin taking the actions necessary to stop this culture from destroying every living thing.
Derrick Jensen
#6. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#8. 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
#9. Where will you drive your own picket stake? Where will you choose to make your stand? Give me a threshold, a specific point at which you will finally stop running, at which you will finally fight back.
Derrick Jensen
#10. 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
#11. It's okay to be happy, it's okay to live your life exactly the way you want it ... It's okay to find what makes you happy and then to fight for it. To dedicate your life to discovering who you are.
Derrick Jensen
#12. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#13. If you see yourself as entitled to a resource, and if you're not willing or incapable of seeing this other as a being with whom you can and should be in relation with, then you're going to take the resource.
Derrick Jensen
#14. You may come to believe that the world cannot survive without your interference, while the truth is that the world cannot survive your arrogant interference.
Derrick Jensen
#15. 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
Derrick Jensen
#16. Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.
Derrick Jensen
#17. From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.
Derrick Jensen
#18. To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity.
Derrick Jensen
#19. The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.
Derrick Jensen
#21. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#22. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#23. There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends.
Derrick Jensen
#24. I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.
Derrick Jensen
#25. 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
#27. Because their supremacist perspective is unquestioned - and the supremacists would prefer it remain that way - all questioning of that supremacism by definition will be classed as speculation, and all speculation on that subject will be discouraged. Of
Derrick Jensen
#28. Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.
Derrick Jensen
#29. Violence, and evil, doesn't always come dressed in black, and it doesn't always look like Charles Manson. Nor does it always come to us as obvious and arrogant[ ... ]. Often it comes to us with the simple plea to be reasonable.
Derrick Jensen
#30. Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.
Derrick Jensen
#31. Food exemplifies the difficulty of withdrawing from the modern economy, because you can't live without it and because not many people produce all of their own. And if its uncommon for a modern person to be food self-reliant, it is almost unheard of for a community to supply all of its own food.
Derrick Jensen
#32. 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
#33. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#35. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#36. We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.
Derrick Jensen
#37. 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
#38. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#39. The task we all face as human beings ... is to find and become who we are. The task teachers face is to find their own way of teaching, one that manifests who they are.
Derrick Jensen
#40. In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.
Derrick Jensen
#41. 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
#42. Consumer culture and the capitalist mindset have taught us to substitute acts of personal consumption (or enlightenment) for organised political resistance
Derrick Jensen
#43. The global industrial economy is the engine for massive environmental degradation and massive human (and nonhuman) impoverishment.
Derrick Jensen
#44. People say 'what do you mean' when you talk about 'bringing down civilization.' What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That's what I really mean.
Derrick Jensen
#45. A real partnership in which all parties help all others to be more fully themselves
Derrick Jensen
#46. If your homeland were invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?
Derrick Jensen
#47. The only real job of a teacher, especially a writing teacher, is to help students find themselves.
Derrick Jensen
#48. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#49. 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
#50. ...a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.
Derrick Jensen
#51. A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer.
Derrick Jensen
#53. We have a need for enchantment that is as deep and devoted as our need for food and water.
Derrick Jensen
#54. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#55. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#56. If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.
Derrick Jensen
#57. I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.
Derrick Jensen
#58. 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
#59. 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
#61. A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.
Derrick Jensen
#62. 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.
Derrick Jensen
#64. I want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.
Derrick Jensen
#65. Isolation leads to psychopathology. Isolated from the rest of nature, isolated from each other by walls of fear, isolated from our own bodies, and isolated most of all from our own horrifying experience, is it any wonder that we are all crazy?
Derrick Jensen
#66. White [...] "Indian wannabees" or as those who mine indiginous traditions the way multinationals mine their land.
Derrick Jensen
#67. Once you break your identification with the system, with the authoritarian technics that are driving planetary murder, your language and your actions become very different. Once you identify with the real, living planet, everything changes.
Derrick Jensen
#68. A system of domination will always be undernourished.
Derrick Jensen
#69. When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work.
Derrick Jensen
#70. I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.
Derrick Jensen
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Our lawns manifest our cultural desire: they are static, they are artificial, and they are kept sexually immature.
Derrick Jensen
#74. If you're comfortable with who you are, however, it becomes no problem to let others be their own selves around you: you have faith that whoever they are and whatever they do, you will be able to respond appropriately.
Derrick Jensen
#75. 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
#76. In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.
Derrick Jensen
#77. 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
#78. My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl - in other words, only four human generations ago - there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home.
Derrick Jensen
#79. My audience consists mainly of people who already recognize how bad this culture is, and I want to push them to become more radical. It doesn't really matter to me if they are Left or Right.
Derrick Jensen
#80. Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.
Derrick Jensen
#81. I had broken the most basic commandment of our culture: Thou shalt pretend there is nothing wrong.
Derrick Jensen
#82. If you only had a limited time to life (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time?
Derrick Jensen
#83. Part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it, and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.
Derrick Jensen
#84. If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned.
Derrick Jensen
#85. I get asked quite often if I'm an anarchist. If they want to put a label on me, that's fine. What is most important to me is to live in a world that is not being murdered.
Derrick Jensen
#86. Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.
Derrick Jensen
#87. I'm frightened of the intellectualism that can insulate us from action and turn the problems and solutions into puzzles or fantasies.
Derrick Jensen
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