Top 303 Quotes & Sayings by Van Jones - Page 3

I want to be remembered as one of the great innovators among social justice advocates of the 21st Century.

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.

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.

You don't get lower ratings playing the villain on reality TV.

We know that urban farms require less fuel for tractors and transport, but community gardens don't plant themselves.

A green jobs bill would include both job creation and job training.

There seems to be a passive alliance between Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump and that's unprecedented in its form and dangerous in its content, because Russia is our most dangerous geopolitical opponent because of the desires that they have in the Middle East and because of their desire to break up Europe. And in the United States, we spent a lot of blood and a lot of treasure trying to keep Europe intact and democratic, and trying to keep the Middle East from being only influenced by people who are massive fans of [Syrian President] Assad and massive fans of the Iranians.

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.

[I wish no one ever asked me ] "Did you sign that petition implicating the Bush Administration in 9/11?" Because I never signed it, and I hate being vilified for a controversial idea I never espoused.

Playing the villain gets you higher ratings on reality TV and saying outrageous stuff on Twitter gets you more followers.

I would argue that we have a patriotic duty to move toward energy independence and clean energy. It is a matter of national security - energy security, climate security, economic security, job security, everything.

We want to make sure people know deeply about the trans community and deeply about Black Lives Matter so that people can act in solidarity.

People care. Their hearts are open, but people don't know exactly what the Dreamers are going through, or what sanctuary cities are for, or what's positive about the American Muslim community. When you don't know a lot, you can't do a lot.

Audacity is the currency for authoritarians.

Higher energy costs are unavoidable in all future scenarios.

I'm not going to let Donald Trump take away from our community, something that Fannie Lou Hamer shed blood to give us. Something that Ella Jo Baker braved conditions in the South and sweatshops in Harlem to give us.

All the old rules - if you say some crazy stuff you get your show canceled or you get your campaign ended - don't apply in the world of social media. They don't apply in the world of reality TV.

Nobody can come and be involved in the #LoveArmy unless they have a heart.

Government needs to do two things: put a price on carbon and invest heavily in new technologies.

In countries where there are real civil wars, people go through a lot, and we should be willing to go through a lot to help them.

Rich countries do civil wars with tweets and votes.

America cannot be America in the new century until it deals with these new questions of gender, including the trans issues, and the questions around faith and Islam.

We need to aim high - in the area of 20-25 percent - to create the urgent demand for new technologies, manufacturing plants and green jobs.

Steve Bannon is clearly somebody who has studied not-normal politics and the Constitution and the Electoral College. He is somebody who has studied Hitler and Lenin and a lot of people who have seized power and unleashed blitzkriegs from above and created tiny cabals of power concentrated in a tiny group at the top. That's what authoritarians do. It's right out of the playbook.

In other words: we can fight pollution and poverty at the same time, with the same method. We can beat global warming and the global recession at the same time, with the same method. We can do this by putting people to work re-powering America with clean energy.

Right now, when you go and hit the light switch in your house, you're participating in a state-protected monopoly. You're being forced to accept dirty power from a single producer.

The laws of supply and demand drive up the price, inevitably, over time. But solar and wind are abundant and renewable resources.

There are some cities that are doing good stuff, but there aren't enough of them. If you don't fight for what you want, then you deserve what you get. And in politics, if you don't ask, you don't get at all.

The problem that we have is that most Americans don't even study American history, let alone Pinochet, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and all these guys.

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.

Businesses will have to lead the charge - demanding uniform, national, predictable rules to govern this transition, so that there is a level and rational playing field on which they can compete to make the next fortunes.

I saw in the Nineties that we were increasing police power with get tough policies and 3 strikes laws, but without additional oversights.

Too often we think about the green economy as an elite market niche, one in which affluent people spend more money to consume greener and cleaner products.

The Love Army is a growing network of people who want to stick up for the underdogs in the red states and blue states in the era of [Donald] Trump.

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.

To green our country, regular people will have to put on hard hats and work boots, roll up their sleeves - and get to work.

I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.

Steve Bannon is the biggest threat to democracy that we've faced since the Civil War, but in the Civil War the champion of democracy was in the White House. So, even then, we were probably in less danger as a country than we are right now.

You don't get fewer followers saying outrageous stuff on Twitter.

We have gotten to the point where we're more like [Donald] Trump than Trump. Trump is hateful. Now you have liberals hating on love. Sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. There's nothing wrong with that. But sometimes you have to fight fire with water. I'm happy to fight it either way.

I'm an environmentalist, and I don't want you to have a disposable aluminum can. I sure as hell don't want to have a disposable worker and I don't care who you vote for. You've got to have that as a moral position. Otherwise, my concern is, all we are is this petty interest group people who can't say anything back to a petty interest group of white nationalism.

If you want to understand what's going to happen, you can't look in the rearview mirror into the United States' history, because that's done now. You have to look out at the rest of the world and look at the history of the rest of the world, and what you'll see is demonstrations and counter-demonstrations are going to become the norm. We'll have a big march, then they'll have a big march, we'll have a big rally and they'll have a big rally. That will be one of the features. Again, a pro-regime and pro-opposition media system, that will become a feature.

Trump is much, much worse than people understand. In his ideal world, you would have an alliance between Trump, Putin, Marine Le Pen, maybe a right winger might knock off Merkel in Germany, and you'd have this sort of, essentially, a nationalist populist alliance that can only be made sense of when seen as a right-wing, white nationalism against the world. Because, who do they want to fight? They want to fight Asia and China, they want to fight Latin America and Mexico.

There's the God within and the God without, and you have to attend to the alignment of the two of them.

I used to be called the "Green Jack Kemp" because of my promotion of entrepreneurial and work-based solutions for poor people.

To make sure we aren't training people for jobs that don't exist, the government should provide companies with loans or loan guarantees. And the government should also directly employ people to do things like coastal restoration, land restoration, reforestation and similar programs that absorb carbon and protect America's beauty.

Frankly, the conservatives need to be better conservatives. Real conservatives actually respect our Constitution and would stand up to an authoritarian. Real conservatives believe in clean, limited government and would stand up to anybody who is basically setting up a kleptocracy, nepotism, and crony capitalism. And real conservatives are actually strong for America and not weak for Russia.

We're going to do three things: teach-ins across the country so people can learn about each other's issues and causes; parties with a purpose so we can shake our butts and not let this man steal our joy; and we're going to do big concerts and revivals with some of the biggest artists in the world. If [Donald] Trump can have 20,000 people for big hate rallies then we can have 40,000 people in arenas for love rallies.

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.

The main obstacle is the entrenched power of the legacy polluters.

Black politics is redemption and transformation. It's not always pretty, but it's not always ugly either. I'll put India.Arie up against Donald Trump any day and let the people choose.

With the Democrats, they see themselves, we see ourselves as the party of the working folks, the striving, you know, the good. But, without anybody acknowledging it, there is now this little camp of folks who come across as very elitist, that look down on red state voters, who think that Republicans are dumb people.

Steve Bannon is the architect of the entire blitzkrieg that we're seeing against American values and the American people.

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.

You put Hillary Clinton up against Donald Trump, I'm scared of the choice no matter what you do.

I have many sources of inspiration. I'd have to point to Dr. Martin Luther King, first and foremost. But my parents were good, hardworking folks who kept us in the church and the public schools, and out of trouble, for the most part.

The more we deploy the technologies to capture wind and solar power, the cheaper those technologies become.

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.

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, we did create Color of Change, an organization which focused on African-Americans in particular, because we felt that there was a big gap there in terms of online advocacy which had left the black community particularly vulnerable.

Everybody should be mad but anger only takes you so far. At some point, you'll have outrage fatigue and burn out.