Ralph nader quotes

When strangers start acting like neighbors... communities are reinvigorated.

Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn't even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.

If you're kept off the debates, you can't reach more two percent of people even if you campaign every state and fill the big conventions like Madison Square Garden.

Washington DC is corporate-occupied territory.

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 60th seed at Wimbledon gets a chance at Center Court. The 60th seed in the NCAA gets a chance to go to the Final Four. But the third seed [in presidential politics] is shut out.

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

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

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.

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.

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

Once you don't vote your ideals ... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.

A wasteful defense is a weak defense.

We have a Democratic Party that cannot defend the American people from the worst Republican Party in history because it's a Democratic Party of war and Wall Street.

That's why I call the Senate the graveyard of democracy, because even when you have 58 senators, they can block it and block it and block it.

If you always vote for the lesser of two evils, you will always have evil, and you will always have less.

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

Members of Congress are like the voters in one respect -- they want to go with the winners.

The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That's the only difference.

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.

Since I was a law student, I have been against the death penalty. It does not deter. It is severely discriminatory against minorities, especially since they're given no competent legal counsel defense in many cases. It's a system that has to be perfect. You cannot execute one innocent person. No system is perfect. And to top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics it, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole.

Families are incubators for citizen activists.

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders.

Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.

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.

If it is unpatriotic to tear down the flag, which is a symbol of the country, why isn't it more unpatriotic to desecrate the country itself-to pollute, despoil and ravage the air, land and sea.

The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

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

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.

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.

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

People have got to show up, showing up at meetings, rallies, marches, City Council, courtrooms. You've got to show up.

Hillary Clinton's ready to pivot to Asia and provoke China. So are the Republicans. It's on domestic issues that there will be a gridlock.

I can say that you [Jill Sander] are my successor on the Green Party ticket so I know a little bit about what you're going through and I'm sure listeners are eager to hear you out.

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity.

It's all these pundits, all these consultants, and the candidates, as if they're in a bubble leaving democracy off-limits.

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.

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.

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

Secrecy destroys accountability.

It was an injured worker finding a lawyer on a contingent fee in a little town in Texas that blew the top off one of the greatest industrial disasters in American history.

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.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

It is basically a strategy to destroy the essence of democracy, which is the competitiveness and choices of candidates on the ballot.

Hillary Clinton's never seen a weapons system or a war she hasn't liked.

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

For anybody here who's very worried about domestic priorities, just consider we have created, with this war on terrorism, more fighters, more countries embroiled. They're learning new weapons. They're learning new techniques. They're coming here in social media. The lone wolf thing is expanding. And once that blows here, then forget about domestic priorities.

In this rigged, two-party system, third parties almost never win a national election. It's obvious what our function is in this constricted oligarchy of two corporate-indentured parties - to push hitherto taboo issues onto the public stage, to build for a future, to get a young generation in, keep the progressive agenda alive, push the two parties a little bit on this issue and that.

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

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.

Congress is the most powerful branch. It can expand a progressive society, or it can block a progressive society.

We live in a two-party tyranny that doesn't believe in competition, can enforce it with penalties and obstructions, and they're getting closer and closer to being both one corporate party with two heads having different labels.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Let's run through the various ways they're trying to marginalize the Green Party and even the Libertarian Party. One way is to keep you off the mass media.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations.

We must strive to become good ancestors.

It's not a cost of doing business when the corporation executives go to jail, and that's why they fight so hard to make sure the prosecutors' budget are very limited and that the campaign cash-greased lawmakers keep defending them against being held accountable.

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

There are some people in this world who would never plant a seed because it doesn't produce fruit the first season.

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.

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.

We have two parties who are basically hijacking our country for their corporate paymasters. And if we focus on 535 members of Congress, that's not all that many, we're going to see a fast turnaround. So focus all your concerns, all the information, the kind of agenda the Green Party has. Turn it right on your Senators and Representatives.

Now unless you have billions of dollars, it's impossible to reach tens of millions of American people no matter how hard you campaign.

President [ Dwight] Eisenhower warned us, five star general, he said watch out for the military-industrial complex. That's a threat to our freedom, to our economy, and what we have now is a gigantic taxpayer draining empire that is devouring itself, which, as you say, it's creating more resistance, more fighting, against us oversees.

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.

If you don't turn on to politics, politics will turn on you.

Ending police brutality and mass incarceration. There is a growing left-right support for criminal justice reform.

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

I don't think meals have any business being deductible. I'm for separation of calories and corporations.

The threats are coming to this country, which will, of course, increase the massive industry known as the anti-terrorism industry, and crush our civil liberties and civil rights, And it's devouring our priorities here in communities all over the country which are in such disrepair and are so neglected in terms of public works and public services.

I hear people who are worried about climate change tell me, oh, Congress that's gridlock, that's not where the action is.

Hillary Clinton is going to find common ground with the Republicans on foreign and military affairs. They both want to enhance the military budget.

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.

Obama & McCain differ, but neither takes on corporations.

The corporations have become our government. They're not just influential. Department by department, you name it, they put their people in high government positions, they have 10,000 PACs and 35,000 lobbyists, so there's no more opening to be heard.

All empires eventually destroy themselves. That's the record of history.

When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.

One time when I was nine or ten years old, I came home from school...and my dad said to me, 'Well, Ralph, what did you learn in school today? Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?' So, I'm saying to myself, 'What's the difference between the two?'.

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

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

A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.

I always say there's no ticket of admission for active citizenship. Anybody can get through that gate, and anybody can ask that basic question that gets the ball rolling.

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.

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.

I think we should make a closer link between domestic policy and an interventionist militaristic foreign policy.

In the meantime the big corporations are fleeing America for tax havens and places like Ireland, Luxembourg and the Grand Cayman Islands; the rich are finding more tax loopholes to expect; so when are the people going to basically roll up their sleeves and say, we've had enough, we're going to recapture Congress.

Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.

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

Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country...But because water belongs to no one - except the people - special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers.

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

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

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

Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.

Hillary Clinton's ready to pick a fight with Putin. So are the Republicans.

Both [Donald] Trump and Hillary [Clinton] want bigger military budgets and Hillary supports President Obama's one trillion dollar expenditure to so-called upgrade nuclear weapons. P

The reason that democracies always defeat dictatorships is because they're open to debate. We should never allow Washington to say, 'Shut up, get in line and wave the flag.'

We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.

The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals.

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.

When I went to Harvard Law School I became interested in the connection between legal standards for safety and automobile engineering design. At that time, it was all blamed on a "nut behind the wheel," so-called, the driver. But I knew that the vehicle had a great deal to do with that because I had come across some Air Force-sponsored studies at medical schools. The Air Force found they were losing more men on the highways than in the Korean War.

By the time you rise through the ranks, the culture of homogenization has bred the spirit and imagination out of you.

Let's look at the Trump and Bernie Sanders insurgencies. They were basically insurgencies against the Republican and Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders made no mistake about it. And, of course, Trump didn't either. And they almost won.

Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses…in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them.

This country has been strip-mined by rich and powerful interests. If you dont like what they're doing, don't just sit there. Vote them out.

Jill Stein, is - and I'll make it in a personal way - over eighty percent of the people when I ran for President knew about me but then I realized that when I was running, eighty percent of the people didn't even know I was running.

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.

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.'

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.

If you're not turned on by politics, politics will turn on you.

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

We're trying to convey how much easier it is than most people think, especially young people, to turn the country around if they focus on the levers, if they focus on Congress, and state legislatures.

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

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

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

[As a child] I was very interested in books that detailed injustice and how people who are underdogs were mistreated throughout history.

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

I think Hillary Clinton is a militarist. She is a political coward. The interesting thing about Hilary Clinton, like Bill Clinton dodging the draft, he never touched the Pentagon - she is in the same position.

Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans

Nothing can stop the power of an informed citizenry when it is empowered, organized, and motivated.

I have a consistent rule: The American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does.