Ralph Nader Quotes

Let's not just look at it as taking votes away from Gore. Our support comes from a lot of people.

Obviously, the answer to oil spills is to paper-train the tankers.

Our public lands contain a wealth of natural resources - trees, oil, gas, coal, gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc, and many other minerals, onshore and off. We own these lands. Yet under current law the corporations control their extraction and pay very little to Uncle Sam for what revenues and profits they reap. Sometimes, in fact, they pay just about nothing.

The accountability of government has gone to the point where the very use of the law is the instrument of illegality.

Looking at virtual reality through computer screens, video game screens, and above all television screens is a denial of personality development. It's a denial of socialization, of expansion of vocabulary, of interaction with real human beings.

The whole story of human history is: The blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.

The Function of Leadership is to produce more Leaders, Not more Followers.

For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.

This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs.

General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it.

Companies like Enron have learned that small investments in endowing chairs, sponsoring research programs or hiring moonlighting professors can return big payoffs in generating books, reports, articles, testimony and other materials to push for and rationalize public policy positions that damage the public interest but benefit corporate bottomlines.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

Families are incubators for citizen activists.

You should not allow yourself the luxuries of discouragement of despair. Bounce back immediately, and welcome the adversity because it produces harder thinking and harder drive to get to the objective.

President Reagan was elected on the promise of getting government off the backs of the people and now he demands that government wrap itself around the waists of the people.

No presidential candidate should visit Las Vegas without condemning organized gambling.

The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.

The 'democracy gap' in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the 'least worst' every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the 'least worst' gets worse.

The central challenge for any company, regardless of its size, is to keep doing a better job for its customers.

The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment.

There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.

A citizenship of wholesale delegation and abdication to public and private power systems, such as prevails now, makes such periodic checks as elections little more than rituals.

A wasteful defense is a weak defense.

Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.

If they don't close these [nuclear] reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years.

Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans

Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.

The lesser of two evils, or the least of the worst, is not good enough for the American people anymore.

The world is shaped by different people with certain personalities that come out of different upbringings.

How often do police accidentally shoot and kill bankers who are committing financial crimes, stealing homes, and plunging the nation into economic instability and recession?

The clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.

The more you talk, the less you'll have to say.
The more you listen, the more sensible will be what you say.

John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.

As a public interest lawyer, your fund of injustice will never be empty.

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust.

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

To know and no to do is not to know.

The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.

The history of successful cases, some of which are in this museum, illustrates that often the regulators and legislatures don't wake up until some plaintiff gets a lawyers and digs out the cover-ups and the incriminating information about a safety defect in an automobile or another product.

So-called generation gaps are especially common among immigrant families; these gaps can produce anxious and unpleasant tensions, and sometimes lead to nasty ruptures or chronic conflicts.

Ninety-seven percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are white men, and what they do radiates all the way down into poor areas and cities around our country. Like predatory lending and misallocation of municipal services. These guys get municipal service, poor areas don't. So they run the economy into the ground, and who suffers the most? The poor pay more and they die earlier.

What we have now is democracy without citizens. No one is on the public's side. All the buyers are on the corporations' side. And the bureaucrats in the Administration don't think the government belongs to the people.

She was the light of our lives, our anchor, compass and vision.

We should tax things we don't like. We should tax pollution ... And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest labor, like food.

Family values stand up to injustice and power outside the household.

The corporations are worried about their reputational damage and a lot of the social media inflicts that, but it's hard to measure it.

We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.

Our founders did not oust George III in order for us to crown Richard I.

Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it.

LOST: 60 SECONDS
DON'T BOTHER LOOKING FOR THEM BECAUSE THEY ARE GONE FOREVER

There was something about playing with the same building blocks that invited encore after encore. What was that something? My guess is that it was the fact that we were interacting with other human beings, not with machines. We were tapping into infinite richness of human sense and emotions, challenging our imagination and human competitiveness, rather than the staccato rhythms and predictable rewards of programmed games.

Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?

It is a disturbing sign of the times when the two most transformative science technologies affecting the globe - biotechnology and nanotechnology - are governed by no external ethical or legal frameworks to protect public safety and other public interests, despite the fact that both industries have benefited from heavy taxpayer-funded government support.

The financial wealth of the top 1 percent of households in the U.S. exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent.

The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington and meets with the puppet in the White House. He then goes down Pennsylvania Avenue and meets with the puppets in Congress. The Israeli leader then 'brings back millions of dollars' in aid to Israel.

If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, we'd be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today.

We have the most prolonged adolescence in the history of mankind. There is no other society that requires so many years to pass before people are grown up ... Adolescence is nurtured and prolonged by educational processes and by industry that has found a bonanza in embracing the adolescent population and fortifying 'adolescent values.' This prolongation of adolescence robs the country of the population group having the most risk takers, and the highest ideals.

The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible.

The concept of individual with a conscience is one whose highest allegiance is to his fellow man.

I don't like too much by-standing, on-looking, and spectator-behavior in people's lives.

If the people are the landlords of the public airwaves and the television and radio stations are the tenants, why don't the tenants pay rent?

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity ...

The liberal intelligentsia has allowed its party to become a captive of corporate interests.

If God hadn't meant for us to eat sugar, he wouldn't have invented dentists.

Is there a number or mark planned for the hand or forehead in a new cashless society? YES, and I have seen the machines that are now ready to put it into operation.

Justice needs money; it always has ... whether for abolition of slavery and early women's rights movements or the civil rights and environmental drives of our generation.

The corporations don't like open courts of law, trials by jury. They want to privatize by pushing people into compulsory arbitration where they win most of the time and the whole process is pretty secret.

This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies.

The common belief that coaches must be abusive to be successful is a myth. Research shows that if you find a task fun, you'll perform better. If more coaches took ... a Golden Rule approach to coaching, treating their players the way they themselves would like to be treated, fewer athletes would drop out of sports in their teens, and more athletes at every level would be happier and more satisfied.

The networks are not some chicken-coop manufacturing lobby whose calls nobody returns.

There is not enough self-consciousness about what a family can be, about what it can inherit from forbearers, and what new traditions it can start as a contributor to the community.

We are practicing what we preach so that we may preach what we practice.

Every time I see something terrible, it's like I see it at age 19. I keep a freshness that way.

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

Business of blurring is fantastic. They both are playing the politics of avoidance. They avoid all the issues on corporate power, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, so on and so forth. They avoid all those. That's the politics of avoidance. All the major issues that are so much on people's minds - health care, living wage, public works, jobs - they avoid.

The food industry, its trade associations, and research foundations, is well financed and highly organized to pressure the FDA.

Nothing short of a federal investigation can begin to disclose the abuses which have woven a fine web of mutually implicating relationships between businessmen and government officials.

Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power.

I enjoy my work so much that I have to be pulled away from my work into leisure.

It is fascinating to watch legislators turn away from their usual corporate grips when they hear the growing thunder of the people.

Nuclear power must be dealt with irrationally ... Nuclear plants are carcinogens. Let's get that story out ... Their lies will catch up to them. We need endless Chernobyl reminders.

This (George W. Bush's) administration is not sympathetic to corporations, it is indentured to corporations

We don't measure whether an economy is developing. We just measure whether companies are selling more, whether inventories are up or down, not whether the health, safety and economic well-being of people are being advanced.

Gates's net wealth is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40% of Americans (112,000,000 people).

Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.

I once said to my father, when I was a boy, 'Dad we need a third political party.' He said to me, 'I'll settle for a second.'

Things have gotten so bad in this country, you look back at Richard Nixon with nostalgia.

Arbitration is private. It doesn't have the tools to dig into the corporate files. It's usually controlled by arbitrators who want repeat business from corporations not from the injured person.

Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism.

Information is the currency of democracy. It's denial must always be suspect.

Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked.

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

When people ask, 'Why should the rich pay a larger percent of their income than middle-income people?' My answer is not an answer most people get: It's because their power developed from laws that enriched them.