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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

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Derrick Jensen
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 19
Author
Environmentalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Human
Productions
Humans
Otherwise
Things
Beings
Life
Produce
Wrong
Values
Expense
Living
Expenses
Culture
Production

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As is true for most people I know, I've always loved learning. As is also true for most people I know, I always hated school. Why is that?
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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.
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There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends.
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If you only had a limited time to life (which is of course the case), how would you spend your time?
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To be clear, civilization is not the same as society. Civilization is a specific, hierarchical organization based on 'power over.' Dismantling civilization, taking down that power structure, does not mean the end of all social order. It should ultimately mean more justice, more local control, more democracy, and more human rights, not less.
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I think it's very important for us to start to build a culture of resistance, because what we're doing isn't working, clearly.
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I thought a forest was made up entirely of trees, but now I know that the foundation lies below ground, in the fungi.
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I wondered what it does to each of us to spend the majority of our waking hours doings things we'd rather not do, wishing we were outside or simply elsewhere, wishing we were reading, thinking, making love, fishing, sleeping, or simply having time to figure out who the hell we are and what the hell we're doing.
Derrick Jensen
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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.
Derrick Jensen
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If we wish to stop the atrocities, we need merely to step away from the isolation. There is a whole world waiting for us, ready to welcome us home.
Derrick Jensen
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The stories we are told shape the way we see the world, which shapes the way we experience the world.
Derrick Jensen
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Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.
Derrick Jensen
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We cannot hope to create a sustainable culture with any but sustainable souls.
Derrick Jensen
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All the mega corporations on the planet make their obscene profits off the labor and suffering of others, with complete disregard for the effects on the workers, environment, and future generations. We have a straightforward proposal: if they want public money, we want public control. It's that simple.
Derrick Jensen
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We have a need for enchantment that is as deep and devoted as our need for food and water.
Derrick Jensen
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From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.
Derrick Jensen
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To believe Christianity stands in opposition to slavery is at best to think anachronistically and at worst to not understand Christianity.
Derrick Jensen
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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.
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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.
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By deafening ourselves to the emotional consequences of violence we have become confused by its relationship to sex. We have come to believe that violence equals aggression, and we have come to base our model of sexuality on our model of violence... converting an act of aggression into an act of consensual sexuality.
Derrick Jensen