Derrick Jensen Quotes

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

The law, unfortunately, has always been retained on the side of power; laws have uniformly been enacted for the protection and perpetuation of power.

But revolutionary is not an acceptable term to those who benefit from, and deny at the same time, the savage exploitativeness of the social system.

In a change of masters the poor change nothing except their master's name.

I think that children are acutely sensitive to injustice because they live in a world that is absolutely filled with injustice. They have very, very little power, and they are extremely aware of power relations.

We have two evils to fight, capitalism and racism. We must destroy both racism and capitalism.

The tyrant grinds down his slaves and they don't turn against him, they crush those beneath them.

Most men today cannot conceive of a freedom that does not involve somebody's slavery.

I'm concerned about - the oppression of the poor.

The pleasures of the mighty are obtained by the tears of the poor.

I've always stood on one fact - that all over the world, there are only two things, the Establishment and the poor people. The poor people are a massive majority and across the world they are exploited in different kinds of ways. The Establishment depends on exploiting raw materials and the poor.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

The purposeful restriction of knowledge has been at the heart of untold misery and hardship in this world. Serfs were kept illiterate so as to not jeopardize the feudal system. Slaves were kept in the dark on a variety of subjects so as to not provide them the possibility of escape.

The margins don't get erased by simply insisting that the powers-that-be erase them.

Exploitation and government are two inseparable expressions of what is called politics.

Through the history of the world there have always been exploiters and exploited. There always will be ... because the great mass of men are made by nature to be slaves, they are unfit to control themselves, and for their own good need masters.

The concessions of the privileged to the unprivileged are so seldom brought about by any better motive than the power of the unprivileged to extort them

Under capitalism we have a state in the proper sense of the word, that is, a special machine for the suppression of one class by another.

The law has no claim to human respect; its only purpose is to protect exploitation.

At what point do the oppressed become the oppressors?

Sex and race, because they are easy, visible differences, have been the primary ways of organizing human beings into superior and inferior groups, and into the cheap labor on which this system still depends.

The blunting effects of slavery upon the slaveholder's moral perceptions are known and conceded the world over; and a privileged class, an aristocracy, is but a band of slaveholders under another name.

You don't fight injustice by asking to become part of the system that committed the injustice against you in the first place. That's like a freed slave striving to become a slave owner.

The system under which we live is owned and operated by people who do not deserve to run the world.

I'm drawn to the figure of the ungrateful subaltern as a trope in literature. In real life, it is often dangerous to demand more.