Van Jones Quotes

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

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.

That's one component: rather than creating job-training pipelines that put these kids at the back of the line for the last century's pollution-based jobs, we need to be creating opportunities for them to be at the front of the line for the new clean and green jobs.

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

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.

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

If [Donald ] Trump goes after - if Trump fails, frankly, to stand up right now for the Muslim community - right now, Muslims are being bullied. Women wearing hijabs are being bullied and people are saying, "Trump, Trump!" when they're doing it.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

Reversing global warming will take a World War II level of mobilization.

It is the work of tens of millions, not hundreds of thousands.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The Trump phenomenon has a lot of really good stuff in it, the anti-elitism, the concern for America's economy in the Rust Belt, the desire to see better days for the country. That's all great stuff. Some of that stuff is Bernie Sanders stuff. The problem is that it's marbled through with xenophobia and misogyny and bigotry.

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.

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.

People are going to have to do a big reset.

But this is a big wake-up call to the entire establishment, including the Democrats. And not just because of the failure.

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.

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.