Derrick Jensen Quotes
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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.
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I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.
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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.
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Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.
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If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned.
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Perception creates behavior. Perception encourages behavior. And because this institution-this artifice-continues to socially reinforce patterns of perception and behavior, if this behavior is destructive, it may not be a bad idea to eliminate or curtail the institution.
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The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.
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Love does not imply pacifism.
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I remember staring at the computer screen-light green letters on dark-then at the clock, and finally at my outstretched fingers held a foot in front of my face. And then it dawned on me: selling the hours of my life was no different from selling my fingers one by one. We've only so many hours, so many fingers; when they're gone, they're gone for good.
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To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity.
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Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.
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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.
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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.
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From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.
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I sat at the computer at work, debugging. I was bored. It was afternoon. I was twenty-two. It was June. Along the front range of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado, thunderheads move in almost every afternoon between May and early July. They materialize, darken the day, spit a few drops, open the sky with lightning, then disappear like so many dreams.
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Civilization can never be sustainable.
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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.