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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
Born
Yale
Problem
Generation
Firsts
Generations
First
Problems
Country
Went
Rights
American
Ninth
Family
Escaped

More quotes by Van Jones

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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.
Van Jones
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People forget: solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Businesses don't retrofit themselves to waste less energy and water, nor do homes weatherize themselves.
Van Jones
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Listen, here's reality. It is completely unfair and absolutely necessary that people who have been oppressed and marginalized have to lead everybody. That is MLK, that is Dolores Huerta, that is Fannie Lou Hamer, that is Ella Jo Baker, that is Nelson Mandela. You walk down the line.
Van Jones
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I am for literally all of the underdogs that I can command and demand better of everyone, including myself.
Van Jones
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We need to think bigger, dream bigger, and get bigger.
Van Jones
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The reality is if you take any three people and look at their cellphones or blackberries and facebook pages, you can get to almost everywhere in the country, because we're networked together in a way that is incredibly powerful.
Van Jones
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I do feel kind of like I have a split identity in that there's Van Jones, who has this big public role and tries to inspire millions of people to do new stuff together. And then there's just me: a pretty quiet, shy, retiring person.
Van Jones
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Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength - and win a better future for generations to come.
Van Jones
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I am not, in fact, a superhero. Just a humble, mild-mannered civil rights attorney.
Van Jones
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It's a tremendous challenge now: to make sure the green economy is big enough that there is enough labor demand that people who've been thrown out of work can be re-employed AND people who are new to the workforce can be employed. And that is going to be very difficult.
Van Jones
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The usual pattern of demagogues is to promise the moon, fail to deliver, and then blame vulnerable others for those failures.
Van Jones
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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.
Van Jones
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I think it would be good to get somebody a job. Right now we're in a bubble of green rhetoric and a bowl of actual green investment and job creation. So my goal for next year is to move from inspiration to implementation on this stuff.
Van Jones
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Most green-collar jobs are middle-skill jobs. That means they require more education that a high-school diploma, but less than a four-year degree.
Van Jones
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Clean coal represents a breakthrough in the marketing of coal, but not in the science of burning coal.
Van Jones
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Clean energy independence should be an area of common ground.
Van Jones
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There's no higher honor, in my estimation, than being asked to serve in the White House.
Van Jones
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Steve Bannon is the architect of the entire blitzkrieg that we're seeing against American values and the American people.
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 said and stand by it. I said that race was a part, and there was a part, that alt-right part, that was a part of the whitelash. And if you listened to the whole quote, you would agree with what I said.
Van Jones