Van Jones Quotes
-
We've have to heed our Biblical obligation to be good stewards of the Earth after leaving the Garden of Eden.
-
Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.
-
In the fourth quadrant (lower right), working-class people are motivated to take on green-collar jobs and start green businesses.
-
Everybody should be mad but anger only takes you so far. At some point, you'll have outrage fatigue and burn out.
-
Even if we can solve the carbon problem for coal, it is still a non-renewable resource. At some point, coal supplies will drop.
-
Ordinary Americans can't pollute for free. You can't dump your trash on the sidewalk or throw all your refuse into your neighbor's yard. I don't understand why corporate polluters should be allowed to dump megatons of carbon, the most dangerous pollution in the history of the world, into our thin shell of an atmosphere, and not pay a penny to do it.
-
To green our country, regular people will have to put on hard hats and work boots, roll up their sleeves - and get to work.
-
The human family has invaluable friends and irreplaceable allies in the plant and animal worlds. We cannot continue to tug at the web of life without tearing a hole in the very fabric of our earthly existence - and eventually falling through that hole ourselves.
-
If you just say that, look at all the good stuff and you don't acknowledge the toxic stuff, you're wrong. If you're only looking at toxic stuff and don't recognize there's going to be some good stuff if you're for infrastructure or whatever, you're wrong.
-
Ninth generation American, ma'am, and I'm the first one in my family born with all my rights. I'm a ninth generation American. And so we have not escaped because I went to Yale all the problems of this country.
-
The problem isn't that the green jobs aren't sexy enough. It's that they're not plentiful enough. A young person looking for a job isn't looking just for a sexy job, they're looking for any job.
-
America should be leading the world in green and clean solutions, and human rights. We shouldn't be leading the world in wars and incarceration rates and pollution. We can be a better country. I think we're going to be a better country.
-
We have gotten to the point where we're more like [Donald] Trump than Trump. Trump is hateful. Now you have liberals hating on love. Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. There's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes you have to fight fire with water. I'm happy to fight it either way.
-
You know it's not "you have to see it to believe it" - sometimes you have to believe it to see it. You have to know what you're looking for when you're seeing signs of an authoritarian takeover of your country.
-
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.
-
I think the most important thing is discovering an idea that moves you, and then letting people who are moved by that idea find each other, and work together. A lot of times people focus on the technical side-"oh, I've got to take a class on non-profit development." Too few people allow themselves to think outside the box with regard to their issue areas.
-
There is, unfortunately, too large a number of people who are just outright bigots in America. They're nowhere near a majority. They're a small number. But there are people who are in the Alt-Right who are just straight up bigots.
-
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.
-
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.
-
God chooses community sometimes to bear an unfair burden to force us to rise to the next level of consciousness and understanding.
-
That we could live in a country with no rules for the rich, no rights for the poor, and no middle class to speak of, is wrong; it's a crime against the next generation and we've got to do something about it.
-
Rather than continuing to base our economy on a finite supply of dead things, we can base it on sources that are practically infinite and eternal: the sun, the moon, and the Earth's inner fire.
-
I think we were naive during the first two years of the [Barack] Obama Administration because the Republicans didn't fight us on this point during the 2008 Presidential Election. Obama and McCain both ran on a clean energy platform. But now, uncontested lies have eroded hard-won public understanding. So, we have to go back and make the case again.
-
I had this radical idea that the police should obey the law. My view was that any human system without adequate checks and balances will tend towards corruption and abuse. That's why you have meat inspectors. Not because you hate butchers, but because of an understanding of human nature.