Lierre Keith Quotes

• It’s time to put away our fairytales, all of them, and assume our responsibilities, the adult responsibilities that begin with adult knowledge. Our planet needs us. She needs us to think like healers and act like warriors. And if you think that’s a contradiction, then get out of the way.

  Lierre Keith

  Responsibility, Warrior, Thinking

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• What is your personal carrying capacity for grief, rage, despair? We are living in a period of mass extinction. The numbers stand at 200 species a day. That's 73,000 a year. This culture is oblivious to their passing, feels entitled to their every last niche, and there is no roll call on the nightly news.

  Lierre Keith

  Grief, Mass Extinction, Years

  Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith (2011). “Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet”, p.20, Seven Stories Press

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• People sometimes say that we will know feminism has done its job when half the CEOs are women. That’s not feminism; to quote Catharine MacKinnon, it’s liberalism applied to women. Feminism will have won not when a few women get an equal piece of the oppression pie, served up in our sisters’ sweat, but when all dominating hierarchies - including economic ones - are dismantled.

  Lierre Keith

  Jobs, Sweat, Pie

  Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith (2011). “Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet”, p.84, Seven Stories Press

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• Meanwhile, every eighteen seconds a man beats a woman, every three minutes a man rapes a woman, and every day two men will murder women. And that's just in the United States.

  Lierre Keith

  Men, Two, United States

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• These political passions are born of a hunger so deep that it touches on the spiritual. Or they were for me, and they still are. I want my life to be a battle cry, a war zone, an arrow pointed and loosed into the heart of domination: patriarchy, imperialism, industrialization, every system of power and sadism. If the martial imagery alienates you, I can rephrase it. I want my lifemy bodyto be the place where the earth is cherished not devoured, where the sadist is granted no quarter, where the violence stops.

  Lierre Keith

  Spiritual, War, Passion

  Lierre Keith (2009). “The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability”, p.1, PM Press

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• Men: Stand in solidarity with women. Women, if you were born female, you were born on a battlefield. You will be punished for even saying that out loud, but the grim truth is you're going to be punished no matter what for the 'sin' of being female. Battering is the most commonly committed violent crime in the United States. That's a man beating a woman. Globally, half of all women will experience life-threatening violence from a man. Half. That's more hatred than I can comprehend. Right now, that battlefield is such a slaughter that we can't even collect our wounded.

  Lierre Keith

  Men, Hatred, United States

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• If we took 75% of the world’s trashed rangeland, we could restore it from agriculture back to functioning prairies — with their animal cohorts — in under fifteen years. We could further sequester all of the carbon that has been released since the beginning of the industrial age. So I find that a hopeful thing because, frankly, we just have to get out of the way. Nature will do the work for us. This planet wants to be grassland and forest. It does not want to be an agricultural mono-crop.

  Lierre Keith

  Animal, Years, Agriculture

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• Love is a verb. We have to let our love call us to action.

  Lierre Keith

  Love Is, Verbs, Our Love

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• The further humans move from hunters to horticulturists to agriculturists to urbanisation to industrialists, the further the sacred recedes, first to heaven, then condensed to monotheism and finally it dies in irony.

  Lierre Keith

  Moving, Heaven, Hunters

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• This is the moment when we have to decide: does a world exist outside ourselves and is that world worth fighting for? Another 200 species went extinct today. They were my kin. They were yours, too. If we know them as such, why aren't we fighting to save them with everything we've got?

  Lierre Keith

  Fighting, Doe, World

  Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith (2011). “Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet”, p.228, Seven Stories Press

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• For those of us who can't be active on the front lines - and this will be most of us - our job is to create a culture that will encourage and promote political resistance. The main tasks will be loyalty and material support.

  Lierre Keith

  Loyalty, Jobs, Support

  Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith (2011). “Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet”, p.212, Seven Stories Press

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• One group of people that get a lot of PTSD are soldiers who have been in combat. You know who gets more PTSD, has higher rates of PTSD? Women who have escaped prostitution. That tells me that the war that men wage against women is actually worse than the wars they wage against each other.

  Lierre Keith

  War, Men, People

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• Understand: the task of an activist is not to negotiate systems of power with as much personal integrity as possible--it's to dismantle those systems.

  Lierre Keith

  Integrity, Tasks, Activist

  Lierre Keith (2009). “The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability”, p.265, PM Press

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• Grains are essentially sugar with enough opioids to make them addictive.

  Lierre Keith

  Sugar, Enough, Opioids

  Lierre Keith (2009). “The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability”, p.152, PM Press

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• What’s looming in the shadows of our ignorance and denial is a critique of civilization itself.

  Lierre Keith

  Ignorance, Civilization, Shadow

  Lierre Keith (2009). “The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability”, p.3, PM Press

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• I think the biggest reason otherwise radical people don't want to face the necessity of ending industrial civilization is privilege. We're the ones reaping the benefits. We've sold out the rest of life on earth for convenience, creature comforts, and cheap consumer goods, and it's appalling. I'm sickened by this bargain.

  Lierre Keith

  Thinking, Civilization, Rest Of Life

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• Resistance is a simple concept: power, unjust and immoral, is confronted and dismantled. The powerful are denied their right to hurt the less powerful. Domination is replaced by equity in a shift or substitution of institutions. That shift eventually forms new human relationships, both personally and across society.

  Lierre Keith

  Hurt, Powerful, Simple

  Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith (2011). “Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet”, p.208, Seven Stories Press

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• Tits are inconsequential, but someone pass me that kitten

  Lierre Keith

  Kitten, Inconsequential

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• Do we want to feel better or do we want to be effective? Are we sentimentalists or are we warriors?

  Lierre Keith

  Warrior, Feel Better, Want

  Derrick Jensen, Aric McBay, Lierre Keith (2011). “Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet”, p.25, Seven Stories Press

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