Van Jones Quotes

22 Sourced Quotes

If we keep pulling death from the ground, we will reap death from the skies.

Van Jones
We want to build a green economy strong enough to lift people out of poverty. We want to create green pathways out of poverty and into great careers for America's children. We want this "green wave" to lift all boats. This country can save the polar bears and poor kids too.

Van Jones
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.'

Van Jones
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.

Van Jones
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.

Van Jones
The main piece of technology in the green economy is a caulk gun.

Van Jones
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.

Van Jones
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.

Van Jones
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.

Van Jones
Clean coal represents a breakthrough in the marketing of coal, but not in the science of burning coal.

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

Van Jones
A green economy begins to replace some of the clunking and chugging of ugly machines with the wise effort of beautiful, skilled people. That means more jobs.

Van Jones
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.

Van Jones
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
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.

Van Jones
Government-mandated and -subsidized ethanol from corn will go down in history as the "Iraq War" of environmental solutions: ill-considered, costly, and disastrous.

Van Jones
We should use the transition to a better energy strategy as an opportunity to create a better economy and a better country all around.

Van Jones
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.

Van Jones
The time has come to move beyond eco-elitism to eco-populism.

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

Van Jones
The end of the occupation. The right of return of the Palestinian people. These are critical dividing lines in human rights. We have to be here. No American would put up with an Israeli-style occupation of their hometown for 53 days let alone 54 years. US tax dollars are funding violence against people of color inside the US borders and outside the US borders.

Van Jones
Apparently, the fossil-fuel industry's strategy is to convince the American people that we should just burn all the way through the last of our oil and coal reserves.

Van Jones