Derrick Jensen Quotes

I get asked quite often if I'm an anarchist. If they want to put a label on me, that's fine. What is most important to me is to live in a world that is not being murdered.

- Derrick Jensen

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

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

- Derrick Jensen

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.

- 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

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

- 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 want you to begin keeping a calendar of who you see and when: the first day each year you see buttercups, the first day frogs start singing, the last day you see robins in the fall, the first day for grasshoppers. In short, I want you to pay attention.

- Derrick Jensen

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.

- Derrick Jensen

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.

- Derrick Jensen

If the world is presented as resources to be exploited, then, more than likely, you're going to exploit the world.

- Derrick Jensen

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

- Derrick Jensen

The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.

- 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

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that's based on the use of non-renewable resources won't last.

- Derrick Jensen

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.

- Derrick Jensen

Civilization can never be sustainable.

- Derrick Jensen