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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
Long
Lasts
Preparation
Years
Understand
Experiences
World
Lives
Endure
Easy
Painful
Disconnect
School
Takes
Wills
Reason
Break
Sufficiently
Come
Since
Thirteen
Children
Child
Employment

More quotes by Derrick Jensen

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From the beginning, this culture - civilization - has been a culture of occupation.
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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.
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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.
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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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Like the layers of an onion, under the first lie is another, and under that another, and they all make you cry.
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Learning has to come from doing, not intellectualizing.
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Civilization is not and can never be sustainable.
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Civilization can never be sustainable.
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?
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Surely by now there can be few here who still believe the purpose of government is to protect us from the destructive activities of corporations. At last most of us must understand that the opposite is true: that the primary purpose of government is to protect those who run the economy from the outrage of injured citizens.
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All writers are propagandists.
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We must learn how to think like the planet.
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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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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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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
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There is always money to kill people. There is never enough money for life affirming ends.
Derrick Jensen
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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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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.
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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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