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In a democracy, you won't always get to have your way. But you should always get to have your say.

Van Jones

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Van Jones
Age: 56
Born: 1968
Born: September 20
Civil Rights Advocate
Environmentalist
Human Rights Activist
Lawyer
Motivational Speaker
Pundit
Jackson
Tennessee
Anthony Kapel Jones
Always
Democracy
Way

More quotes by Van Jones

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I want to be remembered as one of the great innovators among social justice advocates of the 21st Century.
Van Jones
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I'm saying you should have the right not only to be an energy consumer but an energy producer. Follow the money to understand why my message keeps getting drowned out. Big oil and big coal are terrified by the green jobs message.
Van Jones
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We are talking about capital-intensive enterprises, so market certainty is the key. Investors and entrepreneurs have to know that there will be a guaranteed U.S. renewable energy market in which they can compete. Otherwise, they will create the next generation of green companies and green jobs in Asia, not here.
Van Jones
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As champions of green jobs, we're asking questions that progressives should like, like How are we going to avoid baking the planet, and How are we going to create jobs for ordinary Americans? Meanwhile, we're offering solutions that conservative should like. I'm not calling for more welfare I'm calling for more work.
Van Jones
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The boundless capacity of the African American spirit in this country to say Hallelujah anyhow, to use our joy as a weapon, to use our creativity as a weapon, to use our moral clarity and our deep experience as a weapon not just to save Black people but to save all of these people.
Van Jones
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The disaster in the gulf shows: relying on dangerous, dirty fuels can at times impose incalculable costs. I have never heard of a wind farm collapsing and causing a massive wind-slick. I have never heard of a solar farm collapsing and leaving behind a catastrophic sun-spill.
Van Jones
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The human family has invaluable friends and irreplaceable allies in the plant and animal worlds. We cannot continue to tug at the web of life without tearing a hole in the very fabric of our earthly existence - and eventually falling through that hole ourselves.
Van Jones
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In the fourth quadrant (lower right), working-class people are motivated to take on green-collar jobs and start green businesses.
Van Jones
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You can't lead anybody you don't love. You can't do it. It's not possible.
Van Jones
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Though the rampant racial injustices throughout the criminal justice system were offensive to me and to millions of other people, I've never drawn a tight circle around the black community to define the limits of my moral concern. But that narrative tends to get imposed on you, if you're an African-American activist.
Van Jones
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Environmentalists and clean energy champions should stop telling people that we are working for sustainability, which nobody understands.
Van Jones
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Donald Trump understood the dynamics of the new media system better than the people who ran the old media system.
Van Jones
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Now, here's a good question: should serious people focus on global political instability - terrorism, failing states, nuclear weapons - or should we focus on global climate instability - droughts, floods, extreme weather? Here's the correct answer: yes, both, because climate disruption will make every other national security problem worse.
Van Jones
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After all, we are not promoting welfare. We are promoting work. We are not pushing for more entitlement programs. We are pushing for more enterprise. We are not trying re-distribute existing wealth.
Van Jones
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To green our country, regular people will have to put on hard hats and work boots, roll up their sleeves - and get to work.
Van Jones
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The problem is that we didn't fight the way we should've fought. We made it be about [Donald Trump] and [Hillary Clinton] as opposed to making it be about us. If we had said this was a fight, not about I'm with Her but I'm with Us then maybe we would've had a different attitude toward her.
Van Jones
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Right now, the government is spending billions of dollars supporting the problem-makers in the U.S. economy - the polluters, despoilers, incarcerators, and warmongers.
Van Jones
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People in red states and blue states can agree that if we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, letting people work their way out of poverty without undermining community health, we have a moral obligation to do so.
Van Jones
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It is extremely disappointing to me to see that even now when leading Democrats and even military veterans try to make our energy future an area of common ground and not a battleground, they are still being rebuffed by dirty energy devotees in both parties and undermined overall by the polluter lobby.
Van Jones
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Reversing global warming will take a World War II level of mobilization. It is the work of tens of millions, not hundreds of thousands.
Van Jones