Best 72 quotes of Derrick Jensen on MyQuotes

We have been too kind to those who are killing the planet. We have been inexcusably, unforgivably, insanely kind.

When dams were erected on the Columbia, salmon battered themselves against the concrete, trying to return home. I expect no less from us. We too must hurl ourselves against and through the literal and metaphorical concrete that contains and constrains us, that keeps us from talking about what is most important to us, that keeps us from living the way our bones know we can, that bars us from our home. It only takes one person to bring down a dam.

When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to "hope" at all. We simply do the work.

Where will you drive your own picket stake? Where will you choose to make your stand? Give me a threshold, a specific point at which you will finally stop running, at which you will finally fight back.

Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.

Yes, it's vital to make lifestyle choices to mitigate damage caused by being a member of industrialized civilization, but to assign primary responsibility to oneself, and to focus primarily on making oneself better, is an immense copout, an abrogation of responsibility.

A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer.

A friend asked, "If increased awareness means less happiness, why bother?" No answer. Three or four nights later I had a dream. I was driving. To my right I saw baby cranes — blue-green, all legs, beak, and wings — standing in a field. They took off and crashed, took off and crashed. I stopped the car and got out. "That looks like it hurts. Why do you do it?" One of the cranes looked me square in the eye. "We may not fly very well yet, but at least we aren't walking." I awoke, happy. From that moment, there has been no turning back.

...a woman smart and persistent enough that even a PhD in psychology hasn't clouded her insight into how people think and act.

Even if through simple living and rigorous recycling you stopped your own average Americans annual one ton of garbage production, your per capita share of the industrial waste produced in the US is still almost twenty-six tons. That's thirty-seven times as much waste as you were able to save by eliminating a full 100 percent of your personal waste. Industrialism itself is what has to stop.

I am not a Buddhist. Yet there is a Buddhist story that I hold dear. A monk walks in a forest, and chances upon a tiger. The tiger chases him, and the monk runs until he comes to a cliff. With the tiger on his heels, the man grasps a vine and clambers down. Another tiger appears at the bottom. As the man hangs there, a mouse crawls from a crevice just beyond his reach and begins to gnaw the vine. Death above, death below, and death in between. He sees a big ripe strawberry near his mouth. It is delicious. In this moment, flying miles above the strawberry fields of California's San Joachin Valley, I think that I would change the ending of this story. Instead of giving the doomed man a strawberry, what if we leave him alone with the two tigers, the mouse, and the fraying vine? For the last time, his arms grow tired, he feels a familiar ache deep in his muscles. For the last time he catches his breath, feels a rasping in his throat and lungs. He feels this, and a thousand other things. It is all delicious.

I saw a stop sign, and it occurred to me that just as no one expects a stop sign to stop a car, I shouldn’t expect words to substitute for experience. That’s not their job, although words certainly can be misused in that way. The job of words is to direct us toward experience, to round out experience, to facilitate experience, and to give us ways to share at least pale shadows of that experience with those we love. And the job of words is to help us learn to be — and act — human.

It's okay to be happy, it's okay to live your life exactly the way you want it... It's okay to find what makes you happy and then to fight for it. To dedicate your life to discovering who you are.

It will be very hard. You’ll make a million mistakes, and you’ll pay for them all, one way or another. But the hard parts will be your parts, they won’t be hard parts other people have imposed on you for their own reasons, or maybe for no reason at all. And your ownership of them – your responsibility to and for them – makes all the difference in the world.

I waited for him to come out. He didn't. I considered going in after him, but knew the fact that I had readied myself to kill him did not mean that he had readied himself to die.

Someone asked me once at a talk why I so stress the positive with my students yet am such an unstinting critic of those who run our culture and who are killing the planet. I answered immediately, “Power. If I’ve got power or authority over someone, it’s my responsibility to use that only to help them. It’s my job to accept and praise them into becoming who they are.

So while this is a book about fighting back, in the end this is a book about love. The songbirds and the salmon need your heart, no matter how weary, because even a broken heart is still made of love. They need your heart because they are disappearing, slipping into that longest night of extinction, and the resistance is nowhere in sight. We will have to build that resistance from whatever comes to hand: whispers and prayers, history and dreams, from our bravest words and braver actions. It will be hard, there will be a cost, and in too many implacable dawns it will seem impossible. But we will have to do it anyway. So gather your heart and join with every living being. With love as our First Cause, how can we fail?

The fundamental metaphor of National Socialism as it related to the world around it was the garden, not the wild forest. One of the most important Nazi ideologists, R.W. Darré, made clear the relationship between gardening and genocide: “He who leaves the plants in a garden to themselves will soon find to his surprise that the garden is overgrown by weeds and that even the basic character of the plants has changed. If therefore the garden is to remain the breeding ground for the plants, if, in other words, it is to lift itself above the harsh rule of natural forces, then the forming will of a gardener is necessary, a gardener who, by providing suitable conditions for growing, or by keeping harmful influences away, or by both together, carefully tends what needs tending and ruthlessly eliminates the weeds which would deprive the better plants of nutrition, air, light, and sun. . . . Thus we are facing the realization that questions of breeding are not trivial for political thought, but that they have to be at the center of all considerations, and that their answers must follow from the spiritual, from the ideological attitude of a people. We must even assert that a people can only reach spiritual and moral equilibrium if a well-conceived breeding plan stands at the very center of its culture.

The only real job of a teacher, especially a writing teacher, is to help students find themselves.

There is a deeper point to be made here, however, having to do with the specificity of everything. One of the great failings of our culture is the nearly universal belief that there can be anything universal. We as a culture take the same approach to living in Phoenix as in Seattle as in Miami, to the detriment of all these landscapes. We turn wild trees to standardized two-by-fours. We turn living fish into fish sticks. But every fish is different from every other fish. Every student is different from every other student. Every place is different from every other place. If we are ever to hope to begin to live sustainably in place (which is the only way to live sustainably), we will have to remember specificity is everything.

This culture destroys landbases. That's what it does. When you think of Iraq, is the first thing that comes to mind cedar forests so thick that sunlight never touched the ground? One of the first written myths of this culture is about Gilgamesh deforesting the hills and valleys of Iraq to build a great city. The Arabian Peninsula used to be oak savannah. The Near East was heavily forested (we've all heard of the cedars of Lebanon). Greece was heavily forested. North Africa was heavily forested. We'll say it again: this culture destroys landbases. And it won't stop doing so because we ask nicely.

This question of grades being coercive, and of politics being inherent in teaching, applies not only to writing, but to all fields. Mathematics, science, economics, history, religion, are all just as deeply and necessarily political. To believe they’re not—to believe, for example, that science (or mathematics, economics, history, religion, and so forth: choose your poison) describes the world as it is, rather than acting as a filter that removes all information that does not fit the model and colors the information that remains—is in itself to take a position, one that is all the more powerful and dangerous because it is invisible to the one who holds it.