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Derrick Jensen quotes
For us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other and especially to ourselves. The lies are necessary because, without them, many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.
Derrick Jensen
We are members of the most destructive culture ever to exist. Our assault on the natural world, on indigenous and other cultures, on women, on children, on all of us through the possibility of nuclear suicide and other means--all these are unprecedented in their magnitude and ferocity.
Derrick Jensen
If your community is founded on an injustice, that injustice cannot be questioned.
Derrick Jensen
Love does not imply pacifism.
Derrick Jensen
From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.
Derrick Jensen
Writing is really very easy. Tap a vein and bleed onto the page. Everything else is just technical.
Derrick Jensen
If any thing can be predicated as universally true of uncultivated man, it is that he will not labour beyond what is absolutely necessary to maintain his existence.
Derrick Jensen
To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity.
Derrick Jensen
I thought that, given the system of rewards central to our economic system, in which profit maximization is valued above all else and specifically above life, it is probably just as irresistible to the owners of capital (human or otherwise) to exploit workers (and the land): "Nothing personal," they say as they load their property onto the ship bound for the Middle Passage, "but a man's gotta turn a dime."
Derrick Jensen
Slavery was a central concern of governance form the time of the first nation-state. The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known set of laws for governing an empire, prescribed death for anyone who harbored a fugitive or otherwise helped a slave to escape. The relationship between the law and bondage goes back even farther: Indeed, the oldest extant legal documents don't concern the sale of land, houses, or even animals, but slaves.
Derrick Jensen
Civilization is based on a clearly defined and widely accepted yet often unarticulated hierarchy. Violence done by those higher on the hierarchy to those lower is nearly always invisible, that is, unnoticed. When it is noticed, it is fully rationalized. Violence done by those lower on the hierarchy to those higher is unthinkable, and when it does occur is regarded with shock, horror, and the fetishization of the victims.
Derrick Jensen
No matter what we call it, poison is still poison, death is still death, and industrial civilization is still causing the greatest mass extinction in the history of the planet.
Derrick Jensen
I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.
Derrick Jensen
Civilization can never be sustainable.
Derrick Jensen
People say 'what do you mean' when you talk about 'bringing down civilization.' What I really mean is depriving the rich of the ability to steal from the poor and depriving the powerful of the ability to destroy the planet. That's what I really mean.
Derrick Jensen
My great-grandmother grew up in a sod house in Nebraska. When she was a tiny girl - in other words, only four human generations ago - there were still enough wild bison on the Plains that she was afraid lightning storms would spook them and they would trample her home.
Derrick Jensen
In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must, in a broad sense, tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It is not necessary that the lies be particularly believable. The lies act as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities.
Derrick Jensen
Jeanette [Armstrong, "a traditional Okanagan Indian"] said, 'Attitudes about the species communication are the primary difference between western and indigenous philosophies. Even the most progressive western philosophers still generally believe that listening to the land is a metaphor.' She paused, then continued emphatically, 'It's not a metaphor. It's how the world is.'
Derrick Jensen
There can be no real peace when living with someone who has already declared war, no peace but capitulation. And even that, as we see around us, doesn't lead to further peace but to further degradation and exploitation. We're responsible for not only what we do but for what is in our power to stop. Before we can speak of peace, we have to speak honestly of stopping, by any and all means possible, those who have declared war on the world and on us. Those who destroy wont stop because we ask nicely. There is only one language that they understand, and everyone here knows what it is. Yet we don't speak of it openly.
Derrick Jensen
I quit work two weeks later--having sold another eighty of my hours--and knew I could never again work a regular job.
Derrick Jensen
Perception creates behavior. Perception encourages behavior. And because this institution--this artifice--continues to socially reinforce patterns of perception and behavior, if this behavior is destructive, it may not be a bad idea to eliminate or curtail the institution.
Derrick Jensen
From the perspective of those who are entitled, the problems begin when those they despise do not go along with--and have the power and wherewithal to not go along with--the perceived entitlement.
Derrick Jensen
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