Quotes by Derrick Jensen

“a real partnership in which all parties help all others to be more fully themselves”

“I am in this same river. I can't much help it. I admit it: I'm racist. The other night I saw a group (or maybe a pack?) or white teenagers standing in a vacant lot, clustered around a 4x4, and I cr...”

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

“...a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.”

“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...”

“It will be very hard. Youll make a million mistakes, and youll pay for them all, one way or another. But the hard parts will be your parts, they wont be hard parts other people have imposed on you ...”

“This question of grades being coercive, and of politics being inherent in teaching, applies not only to writing, but to all fields. Mathematics, science, economics, history, religion, are all just ...”

“Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, P...”

“There is a deeper point to be made here, however, having to do with the specificity of everything. One of the great failings of our culture is the nearly universal belief that there can be anything...”

“Theres a larger point to be made here than my own obtuseness, which is the fragility, beauty, and at the same time resilience of any communication. An inchoate impulse forms into a feeling that res...”

“I saw a stop sign, and it occurred to me that just as no one expects a stop sign to stop a car, I shouldnt expect words to substitute for experience. Thats not their job, although words certainly c...”

“We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.”

“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 m...”

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

“Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, ...”

“I am not a Buddhist. Yet there is a Buddhist story that I hold dear. A monk walks in a forest, and chances upon a tiger. The tiger chases him, and the monk runs until he comes to a cliff. With the ...”

“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 opposit...”

“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 maki...”

“So while this is a book about fighting back, in the end this is a book about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of lo...”

“A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer.”