Quote

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

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Derrick Jensen
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 19
Author
Environmentalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
True
Predicated
Thing
Universally
Men
Maintain
Labour
Absolutely
Necessary
Beyond
Existence
Uncultivated

More quotes by 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.
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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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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.
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Premise Eight: The needs of the natural world are more important than the needs of the economic system.
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We have a need for enchantment that is as deep and devoted as our need for food and water.
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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.
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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.
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I've since come to understand the reason school lasts thirteen years. It takes that long to sufficiently break a child's will. It is not easy to disconnect children's wills, to disconnect them from their own experiences of the world in preparation for the lives of painful employment they will have to endure.
Derrick Jensen
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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
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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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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.
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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
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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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All writers are propagandists.
Derrick Jensen
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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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Have you ever felt love? Did you need scientific proof of this? How would you have definitively and scientifically proved your love existed? If you could not prove it, would that mean your love didn't exist? What would you trust: your own feelings, or science?
Derrick Jensen
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Civilization can never be sustainable.
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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.
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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.
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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