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Ninth generation American, ma'am, and I'm the first one in my family born with all my rights. I'm a ninth generation American. And so we have not escaped because I went to Yale all the problems of this country.

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
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More quotes by Van Jones

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The laws of spiritual physics will not allow you to lead somebody that you don't love, that you don't care about, that you resent, that you look down on. That's why the Republicans can't lead black people. And that's why Democrats increasingly can't lead these straight, white, male demons that we hate so much.
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There is great wisdom, there's great strength and there's great beauty in all of our religion, and those should be marshaled for good.
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I think the Muslim community is now being asked to bear an unfair burden to save a great faith from the fundamentalists and a great nation from bigotry.
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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.
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Local politics matters a lot.
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When you get $1 billion of free advertising, it's hard not to have anybody buy the product.
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Distorting attacks when people already don't trust you is not smart.
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Unfortunately, we have a 50% unemployment rate among our urban youth of color. It's not about making green jobs more attractive. It's about making them more available. And that requires Congress passing legislation that will give a real break to the people who want to introduce new technologies to the American marketplace.
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Most people walking around in a mall or on a college campus are carrying on them better technology than the entire U.S. government had when it put a man on the moon. Each one of us is a walking technological superpower.
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We actually need conservatives to be better conservatives and we need liberals to be better and stronger liberals.
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We just want government to be a smart, supportive, reliable partner to the forces that are working for good in this country.
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We should not allow the fundamentalists and the bigots to take over and speak for the great faiths any more than we should let them take over and speak for the great nation.
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There are 80,000 jobs in the wind energy industry right now. And you can quadruple that number, if you have the right policy in place to promote clean energy.
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I had this radical idea that the police should obey the law. My view was that any human system without adequate checks and balances will tend towards corruption and abuse. That's why you have meat inspectors. Not because you hate butchers, but because of an understanding of human nature.
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We pull out of the ground death, we burn death in our power plants, and then we act shocked when we get death in the form of oil spills and global warming.
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If we do nothing, the ensuing climate catastrophe will wreck our economy - including wreaking havoc on our food production systems. All credible scientists agree on this point.
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If you look at my career over the past twenty years, I've always been trying to look around corners for low-income communities of color.
Van Jones
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We need to invest in job training programs, especially those that include child care, transit stipends and paid apprenticeships and internships.
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Religion has gotten a bad rap for good reasons. Often, there are a lot of people - women, LBGT, and others - you know, hierarchical monotheism has been a real source of a type of oppression.
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There's a level of self-hatred in giving these people too much power. They're sorry. They're corny. They're hateful. They need some help. Help is on the way. We'll help them whether they like it or not.
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