Top 303 Quotes & Sayings by Van Jones

You've never seen a Columbine done by a black child. Never. They always say, 'We can't believe it happened here. We can't believe it's these suburban white kids.' It's only them!

I cannot in good conscience ask my colleagues to expend precious time and energy defending or explaining my past. We need all hands on deck, fighting for the future.

Let me say what I actually believe. I believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy, by Al Qaeda, and Osama Bin Laden, and no one else trying to hurt America.

The problem that we have in America now is, some people only see the positive stuff and wave off the toxic stuff, and some people only see the toxic stuff and wave off the positive stuff. You can't have an honest conversation.

Come, then, let us go forward together with our united strength - and win a better future for generations to come.

Each and every one of us should stop playing small and license ourselves to become one of the giants of the new century. We will need champions by the truckload.

No one is above the law, and no one is beneath the law.

America should be leading the world in green and clean solutions, and human rights. We shouldn't be leading the world in wars and incarceration rates and pollution. We can be a better country. I think we're going to be a better country.

The message is going to be the same. It's very simple. We're either going to turn to each other or on each other.

I think that for those of us who come from oppressed backgrounds and who do our work in marginalized communities, recovering our innocence is one of the most important acts of self-liberation and de-colonization. Not letting the requirement that we adapt to impossible circumstances and unconscionable crimes leave us shackled to the kind of cynicism and armor such that we can't breathe and laugh and magnetize to ourselves all the genius and love and support that we need to transform the situation. That's probably the biggest challenge, is to recover our innocence.

The surest path to safe streets and peaceful communities is not more police and prisons, but ecologically sounds economic development. And that same path can lift us to a new, green economy - one with the power to lift people out of poverty while respecting and repairing the environment.

A one-sided analysis of anything always leads you into the wrong direction.

[Donald] Trump phenomenon is just marbles with all this toxic stuff, the misogyny, the outright bigotry and so now people are left to try to pull this apart.

To shift America (and the world) to a cleaner energy economy, millions of people will have to go to work in new industries. This necessary shift opens up tremendous new opportunities for work and wealth creation.

When it gets harder to love, love harder.

We need to think bigger, dream bigger, and get bigger.

Civility isn't just some optional value in a multicultural, multistate democratic republic. Civility is the key to civilization.

Our point of view is, lets not be so elitist that we can't honor good, hard, dignified, ennobling work: people working with their hands, building things, putting up solar panels, weatherizing homes, working on organic agriculture, building wind farms. We don't have robots in society, so somebody has to do that work. Lets make sure that the people who can use that work get a chance to do it. I see that as a first step toward bigger and better things.

I'm willing to forgo the cheap satisfaction of the radical pose for the deep satisfaction of radical ends.

In a two-year period, all my dreams came true: the birth of a son... publishing a best-selling book... launching a successful organization... joining the [Barack] Obama Administration... And then all my nightmares came true.

Americans need to see people who are honestly trying to learn from each other, even as we make our own points powerfully and fight for our own values and policies.

Rather than continuing to base our economy on a finite supply of dead things, we can base it on sources that are practically infinite and eternal: the sun, the moon, and the Earth's inner fire.

Environmental justice is the movement to ensure that no community suffers disproportionate environmental burdens or goes without enjoying fair environmental benefits.

We need to invest in job training programs, especially those that include child care, transit stipends and paid apprenticeships and internships.

If we stand for change, we can spark a popular movement with power, influence, magic and genius.

Dr. King didn't get famous giving a speech that said,"I have a complaint."

The green economy should not just be about reclaiming throw-away stuff. It should be about reclaiming thrown-away communities. It should not just be about recycling things to give them a second life. We should also be gathering up people and giving them a second chance.

It's in that convergence of spiritual people becoming active and active people becoming spiritual that the hope of humanity now rests.

If I didn't have that deep grounding, it would be very easy for me to just be someone who is consumed with anger and hatred. And that would be Trump's great victory: to turn us into replicas of him, just on the other side of a wall screen. I refuse to let me or my family or my movement or my friends be turned into the opposite of Trump. I want to be the antidote for Trump.

Now we stand at our own crossroads, looking out upon two futures: one with rising temperatures, rising oceans, and rising violence on a hot and strip-mined planet and another with expanding organic harvests, growing solar arrays, and deepening global partnerships on a green and thriving Earth.

Stop using your phones and laptops as toys and use them to start a revolution.

You know it's not "you have to see it to believe it" - sometimes you have to believe it to see it. You have to know what you're looking for when you're seeing signs of an authoritarian takeover of your country.

Well, we in America are about to break up with oil. Why not break up with poverty and discrimination too?

I think we have every reason to hope for the best but expect and prepare for the worst.

Ordinary Americans can't pollute for free. You can't dump your trash on the sidewalk or throw all your refuse into your neighbor's yard. I don't understand why corporate polluters should be allowed to dump megatons of carbon, the most dangerous pollution in the history of the world, into our thin shell of an atmosphere, and not pay a penny to do it.

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.

The government also has to get the public rules right. That means putting a price on carbon, so the cleaner forms of energy become more competitive. As soon as that happens, a tidal wave of new capital, innovation and entrepreneurship will flood into the clean energy space - creating new jobs and opportunities for Americans of all walks of life. We did that for the internet, with public investments in the basic system through the Pentagon, followed by rules that encouraged innovation and competition. And that is why the internet took off in the United States first.

Barack Obama volunteered to be the Captain of the Titanic AFTER it hit the iceberg

Anybody who's mad should run for something.

Let's stop wasting billions of dollars on prisons, which send people home who are too often less capable and more damaged than when they went in. We would have safer neighborhoods if we spent the same money on true rehabilitation, job training, employment and entrepreneurship.

Distorting attacks when people already don't trust you is not smart.

A lot of liberals think all the Trump voters are a part of the alt right, neo Nazi camp, which is not true. That's a tiny, tiny slice.

I am a proud Christian who has been greatly tutored by Hindus and Buddhists and Sufis and others, and I stand and I speak from that place.

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

We seem to forget that everything that is good for the environment is a job. Solar panels don't put themselves up. Wind turbines don't manufacture themselves. Houses don't retrofit themselves and put in their own new boilers and furnaces and better-fitting windows and doors. Advanced biofuel crops don't plant themselves. Community gardens don't tend themselves. Farmers' markets don't run themselves. Every single thing that is good for the environment is actually a job, a contract, or an entrepreneurial opportunity.

All humans have fear, and those of us who are fortunate have faith.

Trump is much, much worse than people understand. A lot of his supporters are actually much, much better than people know. Most of his supporters are not signed up for an authoritarian coup. Most of his supporters are signing up for better jobs for themselves.

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.

When you take the people who most need work and connect them with the work that most needs doing, you save. You save that young person’s life, you save a whole bunch of money, and you save the soul of this country when you invest and give people a chance, give people hope, give people opportunity.

The usual pattern of demagogues is to promise the moon, fail to deliver, and then blame vulnerable others for those failures.

Right now, the government is spending billions of dollars supporting the problem-makers in the U.S. economy - the polluters, despoilers, incarcerators, and warmongers.

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.

You had a socialist get 47 percent of the votes in the Democratic primary: Bernie Sanders. You have an outright white nationalist populist [Donald Trump] who is now in the White House with an authoritarian strongman who has no regard for facts, no regard for tradition, and no regard for the Constitution. That is what you get when you import third world conditions. You get third world politics, and that's where we are now.

Deep patriots don't just sing the song, 'America the Beautiful' and then go home. We actually stick around to defend America’s beauty -- from the oil spillers, the clear-cutters and the mountaintop removers. Deep patriots don't just visit the Statue of Liberty and send a postcard home to grandma. We defend the principles upon which that great monument was founded -- 'give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.'

Any successful long-term strategy will require that the green wave fully and passionately embrace the principles of eco-equity.

Now is not the time to shrink from the challenge of saving our only home in the universe. Now is not the time to pull into ourselves, retreating into either survivalist or escapist mode. To the contrary, this is the time for titans, not turtles. Now is the time to open our arms, expand our horizons, and dream big. Big problems require big solutions.

If the road to social transformation can be paved only by saints who never make mistakes, the road will NEVER be built.

To change our laws and culture, the green movement must attract and include the majority of all people, not just the majority of affluent people.

If you think love is weak, that's a personal problem because real love is the strongest thing in the universe.

We have the chance to build this new energy economy in ways that reflect our deepest values of inclusion, diversity, and equal opportunity for everyone.