Derrick Jensen Quotes

When humans invented material inequality, they came up with a way of subjugating the low-ranking like nothing ever seen before in the primate world.

Hierarchy is is much reviled in the present day.

Was there ever any domination which did not appear natural to those who possessed it?

White men have too many chiefs.

It has always been the aim of royalty and aristocracy to lower the individual liberty and independence of the common people. A baron and a minute-man could not breathe the same air.

The problem is that the U.K. in essence is a feudal society. It's everyone in their place.

The strong do what they have to do and the weak accept what they have to accept.

Inequality [is] a social control mechanism supported by financial interests’ belief in the desirability of oligarchy.

When humans invented inequality and socioeconomic status, they came up with a dominance hierarchy that subordinates like nothing the primate world has ever seen before.

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.

The ruling class is smarter than you, and they're more creative. And if you forget that lesson, you go down the drain. Because if they weren't, they wouldn't be around as long as they have been and as strong as they have been.

The exercise of power is determined by thousands of interactions between the world of the powerful and that of the powerless, all the more so because these worlds are never divided by a sharp line: everyone has a small part of himself in both.

The breath of an aristocrat is the death rattle of freedom.

What we really need to be understanding is that all of these things matter and they all stem from the fact that certain people live with power and authority and they want to maintain it.

Domination delegates the physical violence on which it rests to the dominated.

Some people are at the top of the ladder, some are in the middle, still more are at the bottom, and a whole lot more don't even know there is a ladder.

To hold a people in oppression you have to convince them first that they are supposed to be oppressed.

Civilization is unbearable, but it is less unbearable at the top.

Sometimes I think the world is divided into those who have a comfortable relationship with power and those who have a naturally adversarial relationship with power.

The higher your station, the less your liberty.

For most of human history, there was a ruling class and then there was everybody else. If you were part of everybody else, it wasn't your job to imagine a different future, different ways of doing things. So, imagination is a fairly modern phenomenon.

The feudal concept of self-preservation is poisoned at the core by the virulent assumption of master and man, of potentate and slave, of external and internal suppression of the life urge of the only one - of its faith in human sacrifice as a means of salvation.

Every man needs slaves like he needs clean air. To rule is to breathe, is it not? And even the most disenfranchised get to breathe. The lowest on the social scale have their spouses or their children.

They politics like ours profess, the greater prey upon the less.

The distinctions separating the social classes are false, in the last analysis they rest on force.