Van Jones Quotes
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There are some cities that are doing good stuff, but there aren't enough of them. If you don't fight for what you want, then you deserve what you get. And in politics, if you don't ask, you don't get at all.
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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.
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Even if we can solve the carbon problem for coal, it is still a non-renewable resource. At some point, coal supplies will drop.
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People can tell if you don't like 'em. African Americans can tell we're not welcome in the Republican Party no matter how many times they say we are. All the signals that it's a party that tolerates anti-black racism is very clear.
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I'm not going to let Donald Trump take away from our community, something that Fannie Lou Hamer shed blood to give us. Something that Ella Jo Baker braved conditions in the South and sweatshops in Harlem to give us.
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In the fourth quadrant (lower right), working-class people are motivated to take on green-collar jobs and start green businesses.
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We need to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to our public high schools, vocational colleges, and community colleges to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future - things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.
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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.
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Trump is much, much worse than people understand. A lot of his supporters are actually much, much better than people know. Most of his supporters are not signed up for an authoritarian coup. Most of his supporters are signing up for better jobs for themselves.
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Clean coal represents a breakthrough in the marketing of coal, but not in the science of burning coal.
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There are 80,000 jobs in the wind energy industry right now. And you can quadruple that number, if you have the right policy in place to promote clean energy.
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There's a lot of things that I think you got to deal with. Hillary Clinton had to put down a rebellion in her own party, then she's going to have to put down the [Donald] Trump rebellion and then try to govern.
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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.
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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.
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Most people walking around in a mall or on a college campus are carrying on them better technology than the entire U.S. government had when it put a man on the moon. Each one of us is a walking technological superpower.
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If we do nothing, the ensuing climate catastrophe will wreck our economy - including wreaking havoc on our food production systems. All credible scientists agree on this point.
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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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I don't like to comment on a specific local issue because there are plenty of people already working on the problem who know a lot more about it than I do.
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We need to aim high - in the area of 20-25 percent - to create the urgent demand for new technologies, manufacturing plants and green jobs.
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Well, we in America are about to break up with oil. Why not break up with poverty and discrimination too?
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Part of what you need to understand is that we're forced to look back. You had the importation of third world or developing world conditions into the United States because of a bipartisan elite consensus for neo-liberalism. In other words, you had both political parties, the smarty-pants in both political parties said, hey, let's do these crazy trade deals.
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I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.
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"Big" government? Who wants that? I just want effective government. That means America's government needs to be big in some places, small in others and non-existent in others.
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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.