Top 60 Derrick Jensen Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “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

Featured in: Quotes About Civilization

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

— Derrick Jensen

3. “If we celebrate life with all its contradictions, embrace, experience, and ultimately live with it, a chance exists for a spiritual life filled not only with pain and untidiness, but also with joy, community, and creativity.”

— Derrick Jensen

4. “Forests precede us and deserts dog our heels.”

— Derrick Jensen

5. “There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists...”

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

7. “If your homeland were invaded by aliens who cut down the forests, poisoned the water and air and contaminated the food supply, would you resist?”

— Derrick Jensen

8. “All we want, whether we are honeybees, salmon, trash-collecting ants, ponderosa pines, coyotes, human beings, or stars, is to love and be loved, to be accepted, cherished, and celebrated simply for being who we are. Is that so very difficult?”

— Derrick Jensen

9. “Love does not imply pacifism.”

— Derrick Jensen

10. “Every morning when I awake I ask myself whether I should write or blow up a dam. I tell myself I should keep writing, though I’m not sure that’s right.”

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

12. “Civilization can never be sustainable.”

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

16. “A language Older Than Words.”

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

18. “You can rarely prove something to someone who does not want to see it proven, and even more to the point, you can almost never prove something to someone who has financial or ideological reasons to not see it proven.”

— Derrick Jensen

19. “We must learn how to think like the planet.”

— Derrick Jensen

20. “It’s no wonder we don’t defend the land where we live. We don’t live here. We live in television programs and movies and books and with celebrities and in heaven and by rules and laws and abstractions created by people far away and we live anywhere and everywhere except in our particular bodies on this particular land at this particular moment in these particular circumstances.”

— Derrick Jensen

21. “I am only so beautiful as the character of my relationships, only so rich as I enrich those around me, only so alive as I enliven those I greet.”

— Derrick Jensen

22. “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.”

— Derrick Jensen

23. “There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends.”

— Derrick Jensen

24. “Those in power have made it so we have to pay simply to exist on the planet. We have to pay for a place to sleep, and we have to pay for food. If we don’t, people with guns come and force us to pay. That’s violent.”

— Derrick Jensen

25. “In order for us to maintain our way of living, we must tell lies to each other, and especially to ourselves. It’s not necessary that the lies be particularly believable, but merely that they be erected as barriers to truth. These barriers to truth are necessary because without them many deplorable acts would become impossibilities. Truth must at all costs be avoided.”

— Derrick Jensen

26. “Once you break your identification with the system, with the authoritarian technics that are driving planetary murder, your language and your actions become very different. Once you identify with the real, living planet, everything changes.”

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

28. “Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight.”

— Derrick Jensen

29. “But what, precisely, is hope? At a talk I gave last spring, someone asked me to define it. I turned the question back on the audience, and here’s the definition we all came up with: hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”

— Derrick Jensen

30. “From the beginning, this culture – civilization – has been a culture of occupation.”

— Derrick Jensen

31. “Many Indians have told me that the most basic difference between Western and indigenous ways of being is that Westerners view the world as dead, and not as filled with speaking, thinking, feeling subjects as worthy and valuable as themselves.”

— Derrick Jensen

32. “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.”

— Derrick Jensen

33. “The process of schooling does not give birth to human beings – as education should but never will so long as it springs from the collective consciousness of our culture – but instead it teaches us to value abstract rewards at the expense of our autonomy, curiosity, interior lives, and time.”

— Derrick Jensen

34. “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

35. “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

36. “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.”

— Derrick Jensen

37. “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.”

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

39. “I no longer see Descartes’ statement as arbitrary. It is representative of our culture’s narcissism. This narcissism leads to a disturbing disrespect for direct experience and a negation of the body.”

— Derrick Jensen

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

— Derrick Jensen

41. “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

42. “That’s what we’re afraid of. The wild. Those we can’t buy. Those we can’t threaten. Those we can’t domesticate. Those we can’t control.”

— Derrick Jensen

43. “Within this culture wealth is measured by one’s ability to consume and destroy.”

— Derrick Jensen

44. “The big dividing line is not and has never been between those who advocate more or less militant forms of resistance, or between mainstream and grassroots activists. The dividing line is between those who do something and those who do nothing.”

— Derrick Jensen

45. “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.”

— Derrick Jensen

46. “We have been taught, in ways large and small, religious and secular, that life is based on hierarchies, and that those higher on these hierarchies dominate those lower, either by right or by might. We have been taught that there are myriad literal and metaphorical food chains where the one at the top is the king of the jungle.”

— Derrick Jensen

47. “You may come to believe that the world cannot survive without your interference, while the truth is that the world cannot survive your arrogant interference.”

— Derrick Jensen

48. “I’m not, for example, going to say that I hope I eat something tomorrow. I just do it. I don’t hope I take another breath right now, nor that I finish this sentence. I just do them. On the other hand, I hope that the next time that I get on a plane it doesn’t crash. To hope for some result means that you have no agency concerning it... When we realize the degree of agency we actually do have, we no longer have to “hope” at all. We simply do the work... We do whatever it takes.”

— Derrick Jensen

49. “Hope is a longing for a future condition over which you have no agency; it means you are essentially powerless.”

— Derrick Jensen

50. “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.”

— Derrick Jensen