Van Jones Quotes
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Now is not the time to shrink from the challenge of saving our only home in the universe. Now is not the time to pull into ourselves, retreating into either survivalist or escapist mode. To the contrary, this is the time for titans, not turtles. Now is the time to open our arms, expand our horizons, and dream big. Big problems require big solutions.
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We need a more diversified portfolio of change-making tools so that we don't just get so freaked out by whatever's happening in the political corner.
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What I saw during the Hillary Clinton campaign [2016] with data dummies who were more concerned with polls than people, they were more concerned with donors than voters. And it wasn't a lot of heart felt on that campaign and I think it left us vulnerable.
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Everybody should be mad but anger only takes you so far. At some point, you'll have outrage fatigue and burn out.
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I'm saying you should have the right not only to be an energy consumer but an energy producer. Follow the money to understand why my message keeps getting drowned out. Big oil and big coal are terrified by the green jobs message.
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With the Democrats, they see themselves, we see ourselves as the party of the working folks, the striving, you know, the good. But, without anybody acknowledging it, there is now this little camp of folks who come across as very elitist, that look down on red state voters, who think that Republicans are dumb people.
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Keith Ellison is an organizer's organizer.He's one of the only Muslims in Congress, so you have a big statement there.
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To make sure we aren't training people for jobs that don't exist, the government should provide companies with loans or loan guarantees. And the government should also directly employ people to do things like coastal restoration, land restoration, reforestation and similar programs that absorb carbon and protect America's beauty.
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Now, here's a good question: should serious people focus on global political instability - terrorism, failing states, nuclear weapons - or should we focus on global climate instability - droughts, floods, extreme weather? Here's the correct answer: yes, both, because climate disruption will make every other national security problem worse.
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I think it would be good to get somebody a job. Right now we're in a bubble of green rhetoric and a bowl of actual green investment and job creation. So my goal for next year is to move from inspiration to implementation on this stuff.
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It's a tremendous challenge now: to make sure the green economy is big enough that there is enough labor demand that people who've been thrown out of work can be re-employed AND people who are new to the workforce can be employed. And that is going to be very difficult.
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We just want government to be a smart, supportive, reliable partner to the forces that are working for good in this country.
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This [2016] election was lost because a total of 70,000 people - out of 120-130 million votes - in the Rust belt, but as a result America is in the calamity.
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Black politics is redemption and transformation. It's not always pretty, but it's not always ugly either. I'll put India.Arie up against Donald Trump any day and let the people choose.
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If you look at my career over the past twenty years, I've always been trying to look around corners for low-income communities of color.
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I have many sources of inspiration. I'd have to point to Dr. Martin Luther King, first and foremost. But my parents were good, hardworking folks who kept us in the church and the public schools, and out of trouble, for the most part.
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God chooses community sometimes to bear an unfair burden to force us to rise to the next level of consciousness and understanding.
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To green our country, regular people will have to put on hard hats and work boots, roll up their sleeves - and get to work.
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We need a national renewable energy goal. Such a goal, sometimes called a renewable energy standard (RES), would spell out what percentage of our power America plans to get from renewable sources.
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People in red states and blue states can agree that if we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, letting people work their way out of poverty without undermining community health, we have a moral obligation to do so.
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All the old rules - if you say some crazy stuff you get your show canceled or you get your campaign ended - don't apply in the world of social media. They don't apply in the world of reality TV.
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In other words: we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, with the same method. We can beat global warming and the global recession at the same time, with the same method. We can do this by putting people to work re-powering America with clean energy.
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I do feel kind of like I have a split identity in that there's Van Jones, who has this big public role and tries to inspire millions of people to do new stuff together. And then there's just me: a pretty quiet, shy, retiring person.
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There's the God within and the God without, and you have to attend to the alignment of the two of them.