Van Jones Quotes

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

The time has come for a public-private community partnership to fix this country and put it back to work.

Clean energy independence should be an area of common ground.

[Hillary Clinton] was going to have a very difficult pathway going forward anyway.

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 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 am for literally all of the underdogs that I can command and demand better of everyone, including myself.

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

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

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.

I've never launched any initiative or campaign that people thought was a slam dunk.

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."

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.

If we do nothing, the ensuing climate catastrophe will wreck our economy - including wreaking havoc on our food production systems. All credible scientists agree on this point.

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?

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.

We're now moving into a stage where the green economy isn't just going to be the place for people to spend money. It's going to become a place where a lot more people can earn money, and also save more money. These kind of solutions require collective action and government action. So as an advocate for government change, even somebody like me gets to have a role.

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.

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.

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.

We have the water, food and other industries which are also experiencing some redirection.

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.

I think parenting is one of the most important jobs, because you can hit two or three generations with the values in your house and the traditions you establish. But I don't think I'm very good at it, and I don't know anybody who thinks they're very good at it. Probably almost everyone gets an A in grandparenting, but in parenting, if you get a B- you're doing pretty good.

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

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?"

All the signals that the Democratic Party is a party that tolerates snobbery and bigotry against, frankly, a lot of traditional Christians, a lot of white guys who work hard every day and who don't feel that they are on top of the world, those signals are clear and it's a turn off.

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.

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.

Nobody wants a nanny state, where the government is stamping out initiative and telling us what to do, but the idea that the only alternative to that is to throw the American people overboard into a global economy with no protections to cushion us from some of these blows is absurd on its face. That's why I think there's been a concerted effort to distort my message. When you hear me speak beyond the sound bites taken out of context, I think I make a lot of sense to people, even those in Red States like the one where I grew up.

If you look at my career over the past twenty years, I've always been trying to look around corners for low-income communities of color.

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.

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

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.

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.

We need a more diversified portfolio of change-making tools so that we don't just get so freaked out by whatever's happening in the political corner.

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

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

The progressives have a challenge. Part of it is that you now have a lot of progressives who feel that 50 million, 60 million people voted to endorse the toxic parts of Donald Trump, that suddenly we now are in a country, you know, surrounded by people who, you know, are proud to be, you know, a part of this alt-right thing and they think it was an alt-right takeover.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Back in 2007, I met this white guy [director Peter Byck] with a lot of hair and a video camera, at a conference that I happened to be attending for the launch of an organization called Blacks in Green. I had never heard of him and Peter had never heard of me. We just started talking; he liked what I had to say, so he asked me if I'd be willing to be in this documentary he was doing about carbon pollution. I said, "Sure!" It was kind of a no-brainer.

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.

The disaster in the gulf shows: relying on dangerous, dirty fuels can at times impose incalculable costs. I have never heard of a wind farm collapsing and causing a massive wind-slick. I have never heard of a solar farm collapsing and leaving behind a catastrophic sun-spill.