Quotes from Derrick Jensen

Within this culture wealth is measured by one's ability to consume and destroy.

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.

A primary purpose of the police is to enforce the delusions of those with lots of green paper.

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

We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.

To pretend that civilization can exist without destroying its own landbase and the landbases and cultures of others is to be entirely ignorant of history, biology, thermodynamics, morality, and self-preservation.

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

So many indigenous people have said to me that the fundamental difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that even the most open-minded westerners generally view listening to the natural world as a metaphor, as opposed to the way the world really is. Trees and rocks and rivers really do have things to say to us.

We have a need for enchantment that is as deep and devoted as our need for food and water.

Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.

Love does not imply pacifism.

If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?

So long as we only believe in the justice of the state, of the law-made by those in power, to serve those in power-so long will we continue to be exploited by those in power.

Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.

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.

In order to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves.

A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.

A culture that values production over life values the wrong things, because it will produce things at the expense of living beings, human or otherwise.

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.

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.

If you only had a limited time to life (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time?

My audience consists mainly of people who already recognize how bad this culture is, and I want to push them to become more radical. It doesn't really matter to me if they are Left or Right.

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

I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.