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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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Derrick Jensen
Age: 63
Born: 1960
Born: December 19
Author
Environmentalist
Novelist
Philosopher
Writer
Reason
Break
Sufficiently
Come
Since
Thirteen
Children
Child
Employment
Long
Lasts
Preparation
Years
Understand
Experiences
World
Lives
Endure
Easy
Painful
Disconnect
School
Takes
Wills

More quotes by Derrick Jensen

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From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.
Derrick Jensen
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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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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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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.
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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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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.
Derrick Jensen
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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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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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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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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
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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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Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.
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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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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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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All writers are propagandists.
Derrick Jensen
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Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.
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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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
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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