Van Jones Quotes about Country

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.

You know it's not "you have to see it to believe it" - sometimes you have to believe it to see it. You have to know what you're looking for when you're seeing signs of an authoritarian takeover of your country.

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.

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.

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.

I want the coal miners, who've been American heroes, who kept the lights put on for black people and white people for a hundred years, and who now are too sick to work, I want them to be able to go see a doctor. I don't care who they vote for. I don't care if they vote for a Tea Party Republican, I'm fighting for you because I voted for you to live in a country where we don't have disposable people.

I learned more in those six months [ in the White House] than in the prior six years. I don't think that anybody who has had the privilege to serve the country at that level should walk out and behave like a crybaby. And I plan to continue to serve the country in other capacities.

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.

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 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.

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.

Steve Bannon is the biggest threat to democracy that we've faced since the Civil War, but in the Civil War the champion of democracy was in the White House. So, even then, we were probably in less danger as a country than we are right now.

We should tell people we are working to protect our country. We are working to make America stronger for the long run.

In countries where there are real civil wars, people go through a lot, and we should be willing to go through a lot to help them.

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.

We're going to do three things: teach-ins across the country so people can learn about each other's issues and causes; parties with a purpose so we can shake our butts and not let this man steal our joy; and we're going to do big concerts and revivals with some of the biggest artists in the world. If [Donald] Trump can have 20,000 people for big hate rallies then we can have 40,000 people in arenas for love rallies.

Rich countries do civil wars with tweets and votes.

The boundless capacity of the African American spirit in this country to say Hallelujah anyhow, to use our joy as a weapon, to use our creativity as a weapon, to use our moral clarity and our deep experience as a weapon not just to save Black people but to save all of these people.

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

We should use the transition to a better energy strategy as an opportunity to create a better economy and a better country all around.

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

That we could live in a country with no rules for the rich, no rights for the poor, and no middle class to speak of, is wrong; it's a crime against the next generation and we've got to do something about it.