Best 274 quotes of Van Jones on MyQuotes

Fighting for and defending the values from the pulpit is critical. You can't love the Creator, and disrespect the creation.

For me, I think that the struggle around how to deal with Islam in the United States is the defining moral struggle of this half of the new century.

Former brownfields, depressed urban areas, and hard-hit rural towns blossom as eco-industrial parks, green enterprise zones, and eco-villages. Farmers' markets, community co-ops, and mobile markets get fresh, organic produce to the people who can't afford to shop at health-food stores.

Frankly, the conservatives need to be better conservatives. Real conservatives actually respect our Constitution and would stand up to an authoritarian. Real conservatives believe in clean, limited government and would stand up to anybody who is basically setting up a kleptocracy, nepotism, and crony capitalism. And real conservatives are actually strong for America and not weak for Russia.

God chooses community sometimes to bear an unfair burden to force us to rise to the next level of consciousness and understanding.

Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.

Government needs to do two things: put a price on carbon and invest heavily in new technologies.

Hatred of the people who hate you, that is the opposite of being the enemy. I want to fight fire with water wherever I can.

Higher energy costs are unavoidable in all future scenarios.

Hillary Clinton did try to reach out to the Sanders voters with policy concessions, but Sanders voters, especially his most activist core, are process people. They're not policy wonks. They're people who want big money out of politics. They're people who want fairness from the DNC chair. They're people who want every vote to count. They're the people who don't like Wall Street money. Right? They're primarily about the process of politics and whether or not it's fair and whether or not big-money elites are rigging things in your favor.

[Hillary Clinton] was going to have a very difficult pathway going forward anyway.

I am not, in fact, a superhero. Just a humble, mild-mannered civil rights attorney.

I am 100 percent on the side of insisting that white people step up to a different level of consciousness and commitment and the great gifts of the West and the great gifts of white culture and white community be used for a better purpose than this nonsense of supporting Trump. I insist on that. I refuse to accept that. I refuse to accept that we are going to give over 60 million people over to this guy.

I am a proud Christian who has been greatly tutored by Hindus and Buddhists and Sufis and others, and I stand and I speak from that place.

I am for literally all of the underdogs that I can command and demand better of everyone, including myself.

I am sharing my faith with my sons. I pray, meditate and read devotionally. But let me be clear: I am a "person of faith" not because I am a saint, but because I am a sinner.

I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

I consider myself to be sort of a progressive Afrofuturist that is deeply committed to social justice.

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.

I don't put myself above anyone, and I have as many shortcomings as any non-believer. I just choose to turn to a higher power to help me gain wisdom and, I hope, improve over time.

I do think it's dangerous when you are overly secularizing, and sometimes you get very smart, and sometimes [you] gain a lot of smarts, but you lose a lot of wisdom.

If all we are for is black people and white people who like black people, then I have nothing to say to Trump who is only for white people and black people who like him.

If [Donald ] Trump goes after - if Trump fails, frankly, to stand up right now for the Muslim community - right now, Muslims are being bullied. Women wearing hijabs are being bullied and people are saying, "Trump, Trump!" when they're doing it.

If [Donald] Trump throws 20 million off of health care, that's going to be - if he handles this badly - and it's very hard to handle it right, then that's a - a huge advantage in the mid-terms for us.

If I didn't have that deep grounding, it would be very easy for me to just be someone who is consumed with anger and hatred. And that would be Trump's great victory: to turn us into replicas of him, just on the other side of a wall screen. I refuse to let me or my family or my movement or my friends be turned into the opposite of Trump. I want to be the antidote for Trump.

If people leave your coalition, whose fault is it? It's your fault. You have to build a coalition that's attractive to people.

If the road to social transformation can be paved only by saints who never make mistakes, the road will NEVER be built.

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.

If we keep pulling death from the ground, we will reap death from the skies.

If we stand for change, we can spark a popular movement with power, influence, magic and genius.

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.

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.

If you think love is weak, that's a personal problem because real love is the strongest thing in the universe.

If you want to understand what's going to happen, you can't look in the rearview mirror into the United States' history, because that's done now. You have to look out at the rest of the world and look at the history of the rest of the world, and what you'll see is demonstrations and counter-demonstrations are going to become the norm. We'll have a big march, then they'll have a big march, we'll have a big rally and they'll have a big rally. That will be one of the features. Again, a pro-regime and pro-opposition media system, that will become a feature.

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.

I have become the poster child for calling all the Trump people racists, when, in fact, I don't think they're all racists, but they tolerated racism. And that's a problem.

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.

I learned more in those six months [ in the White House] than in the prior six years. I don't think that anybody who has had the privilege to serve the country at that level should walk out and behave like a crybaby. And I plan to continue to serve the country in other capacities.

I'm an environmentalist, and I don't want you to have a disposable aluminum can. I sure as hell don't want to have a disposable worker and I don't care who you vote for. You've got to have that as a moral position. Otherwise, my concern is, all we are is this petty interest group people who can't say anything back to a petty interest group of white nationalism.

I'm excited about our rising generation.

I'm not asking for more entitlement programs; I'm asking for more enterprise.

I'm not calling for redistributing wealth; I'm calling for reinvigorating our stuck energy sector, so some new entrepreneurs can create some new wealth.

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.

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.

I'm the guy that's trying to break up that monopoly to introduce free enterprise and competition to the energy sector.

I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.

In addition, black folks need to attend green conferences, too. We just self-segregate and don't go. They might even waive your fee if you apply on a diversity basis, because they'd be so shocked to see somebody from a different background wanting to be a part of the green movement.

In a two-year period, all my dreams came true: the birth of a son... publishing a best-selling book... launching a successful organization... joining the [Barack] Obama Administration... And then all my nightmares came true.

In countries where there are real civil wars, people go through a lot, and we should be willing to go through a lot to help them.

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.