Van Jones Quotes

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

After all, we are not promoting welfare. We are promoting work. We are not pushing for more entitlement programs. We are pushing for more enterprise. We are not trying re-distribute existing wealth.

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.

Every person with a pulse has a responsibility to stand in solidarity with the Muslim community that is on the front lines fighting against groups like ISIS, both militarily and ideologically, every day, and now on the front line of standing up for civil liberties and civil rights to make America great. [They] are the best insurance for the safety of all Americans.

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

Local politics matters a lot.

Trump is holding together the shakiest coalition that you could conceivably govern on. It is a conservative, populist alliance that agrees with itself on very little.

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.

We thought Donald Trump was leaving that world of entertainment and climbing over the wall into politics. In fact, what he did was he pulled the world of politics into the world of reality television.

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.

We just want government to be a smart, supportive, reliable partner to the forces that are working for good in this country.

[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.

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

The reality is if you take any three people and look at their cellphones or blackberries and facebook pages, you can get to almost everywhere in the country, because we're networked together in a way that is incredibly powerful.

On the eve of historic fights for health care and clean energy, opponents of reform have mounted a vicious smear campaign against me. They are using lies and distortions to distract and divide. I have been inundated with calls - from across the political spectrum -- urging me to 'stay and fight.' But I came here to fight for others, not for myself. 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.

To solve the new century's mounting social and environmental problems, people of color activist and white activists need to be able to join forces. But all too often, the unconscious racism of white activists stands in the way of any effective, worthwhile collaboration. The Challenging White Supremacy Workshop is the most powerful tool that I have seen for removing the barriers to true partnerships between people of color and white folks. If the CWS trainings were mandatory for all white activists, the progressive movement in the United States would be unstoppable.

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.

We tend to overlook the fact that a mature clean energy economy in fact will give an opportunity to ordinary people to earn more money as clean energy workers/entrepreneurs - and save more money, through conservation and energy efficiency.

The bombs the government drops in Iraq are the bombs that blew up in New York City.

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.

When somebody comes along and says, "I think Washington, DC, sucks," that's not wrong.

Environmentalists and clean energy champions should stop telling people that we are working for "sustainability," which nobody understands.

Donald Trump's a great deal-maker with a lot of momentum and it will do a lot of damage to us. We are in grave peril and it's going to be terrible.

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.

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

The chief moral obligation of the 21st Century is to build a green economy that is strong enough to lift people out of poverty. Those communities that were locked out of the last century's pollution-based economy must be locked into the new, clean and renewable economy. Our youth need green-collar jobs, not jails.

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.

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.

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.

This [2016] election was lost because a total of 70,000 people - out of 120-130 million votes - in the Rust belt, but as a result America is in the calamity.

Sometimes we overemphasize the political system. There are other ways to make a difference. There's technology, there's media, there's business.

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

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.

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

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.

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 don't like to comment on a specific local issue because there are plenty of people already working on the problem who know a lot more about it than I do.

To the God in myself is probably the most honest answer. I think everybody has a divine destiny.

I think the Muslim community is now being asked to bear an unfair burden to save a great faith from the fundamentalists and a great nation from bigotry.

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

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

Audacity is the currency for authoritarians.

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.

If you just say that, look at all the good stuff and you don't acknowledge the toxic stuff, you're wrong. If you're only looking at toxic stuff and don't recognize there's going to be some good stuff if you're for infrastructure or whatever, you're wrong.

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

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

The people who seem to us to be a very tiny elite, far off and mysterious, actually live in a fairly big world. The way they look at the planet is like they're looking at an index card covered in supply routes. We protestors had imagined ourselves this huge threat. But we were at best bemusing. To the extent that the people inside did care, it was almost like we were paying them a compliment-it reinforced their sense of power.

We are trying to reinvigorate our stagnant energy sector, to create avenues for new wealth. Clean energy innovation, job creation and energy independence should be common ground for all Americans.