Derrick Jensen

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

“If you see yourself as entitled to a resource, and if you're not willing or incapable of seeing this other as a being with whom you can and should be in relation with, then you're going to take the resource.”

“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.”

“Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.”

“I think a lot of us are increasingly recognizing that the dominant culture is killing the planet.”

“Maud Gonne was - excuse me, Maud Gonne was central to the Gaelic literature revival. She wrote plays, and she sang.”

“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.”

“Civilization can never be sustainable.”

“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 sawbaby 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.”

“In all of my books, I've emphasized that the fundamental difference between civilized and indigenous ways of being is that, for even the most open-minded of the civilized, listening to the natural world is a metaphor.”

“Part of the problem is that we have become so dependent upon this system that is killing and exploiting us, it has become almost impossible for us to imagine living outside of it, and it's very difficult physically for us to live outside of it.”

“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.”

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

“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.”