Top 303 Quotes & Sayings by Van Jones - Page 2

I'm only 42, and I've got a lot more tricks up my sleeve.

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.

We need a much deeper understanding of exactly what it is our industrial society, in its present creation, is jeopardizing. We need a more profound perception of what is at stake.

Now I think liberals have gone from underreacting to Trump and saying that Trump is just a clown and a buffoon, and that Hillary Clinton's going to kick his ass, to now overreacting, and saying, "Oh my God, 60 million people consciously endorsed a white supremacist for president."

Reversing global warming will take a World War II level of mobilization. It is the work of tens of millions, not hundreds of thousands.

I do think it's dangerous when you are overly secularizing, and sometimes you get very smart, and sometimes [you] gain a lot of smarts, but you lose a lot of wisdom.

Part of what you need to understand is that we're forced to look back. You had the importation of third world or developing world conditions into the United States because of a bipartisan elite consensus for neo-liberalism. In other words, you had both political parties, the smarty-pants in both political parties said, hey, let's do these crazy trade deals.

Even if we can solve the carbon problem for coal, it is still a non-renewable resource. At some point, coal supplies will drop.

Local politics matters a lot.

It's become fashionable to put down people who we then expect to vote for us.

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.

We're going to bake this planet, and be a curse to all species, including our own, if we don't find an alternative to carbon-based fuel. That's the #1 problem.

The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City.

If all we are for is black people and white people who like black people, then I have nothing to say to Trump who is only for white people and black people who like him.

The people who seem to us to be a very tiny elite, far off and mysterious, actually live in a fairly big world. The way they look at the planet is like they're looking at an index card covered in supply routes. We protestors had imagined ourselves this huge threat. But we were at best bemusing. To the extent that the people inside did care, it was almost like we were paying them a compliment-it reinforced their sense of power.

Donald Trump's promised the moon. Now he has power. He's going to fail to deliver. He's not going to be able to bring a bunch of coal jobs back and a bunch of factory jobs back in this global economy. Period. Because you can't. It's not going to happen.

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.

Clean energy is hippy power. But its also cowboy power, it's rancher power, it's Appalachian power.

Donald Trump's a great deal-maker with a lot of momentum and it will do a lot of damage to us. We are in grave peril and it's going to be terrible.

Keith Ellison is the future of the Democratic Party, the future of the progressive movement.

We need to send hundreds of millions of dollars down to our public high schools, vocational colleges, and community colleges to begin training people in the green-collar work of the future - things like solar-panel installation, retrofitting buildings that are leaking energy, wastewater reclamation, organic food, materials reuse and recycling.

I'm the guy that's trying to break up that monopoly to introduce free enterprise and competition to the energy sector.

We've have to heed our Biblical obligation to be good stewards of the Earth after leaving the Garden of Eden.

The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco-populism. Ecopopulism. To change our laws and culture, the green movement justice, political solutions and social change.

You have the Republican Party, who see themselves in their heart of hearts as being a party of colorblind meritocracy. That's their great belief about themselves. And yet somehow you also have a party where a lot of racial resentment and a camp of even neo-Nazis have set up camp in their party. If you point it out to them, they get mad at you, not at the neo-Nazis.

We are trying to reinvigorate our stagnant energy sector, to create avenues for new wealth. Clean energy innovation, job creation and energy independence should be common ground for all Americans.

Hatred of the people who hate you, that is the opposite of being the enemy. I want to fight fire with water wherever I can.

I think there's going to be a tug of war in this country over who are the real patriots because at a time of national crisis, economic collapse and calamity, ecological peril and social dislocation, the American people deserve to be a partner to the American government.

I want the coal miners, who've been American heroes, who kept the lights put on for black people and white people for a hundred years, and who now are too sick to work, I want them to be able to go see a doctor. I don't care who they vote for. I don't care if they vote for a Tea Party Republican, I'm fighting for you because I voted for you to live in a country where we don't have disposable people.

We tend to overlook the fact that a mature clean energy economy in fact will give an opportunity to ordinary people to earn more money as clean energy workers/entrepreneurs - and save more money, through conservation and energy efficiency.

Trust your intuition and be resilient. If you have real breakout ideas, even your friends will laugh at you secretly until you can prove their viability.

In the U.S., African- Americans, no matter what we do - when we sit in, when we freedom ride, when we kneel in, whatever it is, the initial response from the public tends to be overwhelmingly negative, because basically we're kind of raining on folks' parades. As time goes on, the Muhammad Ali's and all the people that raised those issues, they then become heroes later when people reflect on the courage they showed and the issues that they raised. And Donald Trump is in danger of being a more and more reviled figure as the years go on.

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.

The question is: do we pay a little bit more now? Or do we pay a whole lot later? For the equivalent of a postage stamp a day for each American, we can put a price on carbon today that will send a signal to private capital to invest in the clean technologies of tomorrow. Taking a vast portfolio of new energy solutions to scale will ultimately drive down costs through competition.

It's time to start bringing the congregations down to City Hall and to ask the mayors, the city councils and the school boards, "What's the plan? What's the local government going to do for us?"

Fighting for and defending the values from the pulpit is critical. You can't love the Creator, and disrespect the creation.

I'm learning and changing all the time, and I expect to continue doing so my entire life.

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.

I learned more in those six months [ in the White House] than in the prior six years. I don't think that anybody who has had the privilege to serve the country at that level should walk out and behave like a crybaby. And I plan to continue to serve the country in other capacities.

There are only two ways to have a middle class in your country: either you have highly skilled manufacturing jobs, or you have a highly skilled, well trained, knowledge-based workforce. In other words, college.

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.

I'm not asking for more entitlement programs; I'm asking for more enterprise.

We're just trying to end illegitimate government support for a single technology, which is un-American. We should be leading the world in the next generation of technological innovation. But we can't unleash private capital because of what the government is doing to stifle innovation and to choke competition.

In addition, black folks need to attend green conferences, too. We just self-segregate and don't go. They might even waive your fee if you apply on a diversity basis, because they'd be so shocked to see somebody from a different background wanting to be a part of the green movement.

I have become the poster child for calling all the Trump people racists, when, in fact, I don't think they're all racists, but they tolerated racism. And that's a problem.

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.

I consider myself to be sort of a progressive Afrofuturist that is deeply committed to social justice.

We need a national renewable energy goal. Such a goal, sometimes called a renewable energy standard (RES), would spell out what percentage of our power America plans to get from renewable sources.

All the big ideas for getting us onto a lower carbon trajectory involve a lot of people doing a lot of work, and that's been missing from the conversation. This is a great time to go to the next step and ask, well, who's going to do the work? Who's going to invest in the new technologies? What are ways to get communities wealth, improved health, and expanded job opportunities out of this improved transition?

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.

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.

This [2016] election was lost because a total of 70,000 people - out of 120-130 million votes - in the Rust belt, but as a result America is in the calamity.

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.

God chooses community sometimes to bear an unfair burden to force us to rise to the next level of consciousness and understanding.

Asia is rising economically - and is thirsty for oil. The price pressures on oil and oil price shocks, due to Asia's economic rise, mean that all steps made now to reduce oil dependence will protect us from pain and volatility later.

We actually need conservatives to be better conservatives and we need liberals to be better and stronger liberals.

America's government has to get the public investments right.

I'm not calling for redistributing wealth; I'm calling for reinvigorating our stuck energy sector, so some new entrepreneurs can create some new wealth.

There's a lot of things that I think you got to deal with. Hillary Clinton had to put down a rebellion in her own party, then she's going to have to put down the [Donald] Trump rebellion and then try to govern.

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.