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Lierre Keith

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Famous Lierre Keith Quotes

“There is no place left for the buffalo to roam. There’s only corn, wheat, and soy. About the only animals that escaped the biotic cleansing of the agriculturalists are small animals like mice and rabbits, and billions of them are killed by the harvesting equipment every year. Unless you’re out there with a scythe, don’t forget to add them to the death toll of your vegetarian meal. They count, and they died for your dinner, along with all the animals that have dwindled past the point of genetic feasibility.”

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Book:The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
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“Inhabitants of urban industrial cultures have no point of contact with grain, chickens, cows, or, for that matter, with topsoil. We have no basis of experience to outweigh the arguments of political vegetarians. We have no idea what plants, animals, or soil eat, or how much. Which means we have no idea what we ourselves are eating.”

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Book:The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
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“John Locke, called the Father of Liberalism, made the argument that the individual instead of the community was the foundation of society. He believed that government existed by the consent of the governed, not by divine right. But the reason government is necessary is to defend private property, to keep people from stealing from each other. This idea appealed to the wealthy for an obvious reason: they wanted to keep their wealth. From the perspective of the poor, things look decidedly different. The rich are able to accumulate wealth by taking the labor of the poor and by turning the commons into privately owned commodities; therefore, defending the accumulation of wealth in a system that has no other moral constraints is in effect defending theft, not protecting against it.”

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Book:Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
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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.”

IfsMenI CanMatterStatesBornSinUnitedHalfUnited StatesViolenceCrimeRight NowTruth IsFemaleHatredNo Matter WhatCommittedViolentLoudWoundedSolidarityThreateningMen WomenBattlefieldsSlaughterGrimViolent CrimesBattering
Author:Lierre Keith
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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.”

PeopleKnowsSometimesDoneJobsHalfPiecesFeminismEconomicEqualIncludingOppressionLiberalismSweatPieCeoHierarchyDominating
Book:Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
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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.”

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Book:Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
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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.”

IfsWorldWayWantYearsDoeHas BeensAgeAnimalPlanetsForestsHopefulAgricultureFifteenCarbonCropsFifteen YearsPrairieMonoGrasslands
Author:Lierre Keith
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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.”

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Book:Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
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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?”

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Book:Deep Green Resistance: Strategy to Save the Planet
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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.”

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Author:Lierre Keith
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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.”

IfsWantHeartStillsI CanWarEarthSpiritualPoliticalPassionBornViolenceCryBattleHungerGrantedZoneQuartersPatriarchyImperialismDominationImageryArrowsSadismIndustrializationWar ZonesBattle Cry
Book:The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
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