Ralph Nader Quotes

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

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

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.

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

The flow from knowledge to action draws upon the complete person with his or her catalyst and synergistic potential.

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity.

If you know what's going on and know how society can be improved and happiness advanced, you tend to focus on how to get things done that will help health, safety, opportunity, justice, accountability of powerful institutions to the people they are supposed to serve.

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

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

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

We must strive to become good ancestors.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

This policy represents a massive injustice against Iraqi civilians, ... and it must be ended - not after Mr. Clinton leaves office, but now.

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

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

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.

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 start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

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.

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

I think most Americans are ready for waging peace and not just brutalizing our foreign policy which is boomeranging against us.

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.

Families are incubators for citizen activists.

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.

Secrecy destroys accountability.

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

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.'

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.

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.'

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.

Word of mouth is the most effective means of communication.

Militaristic foreign policy is destroying America.

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

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

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.

Washington DC is corporate-occupied territory.

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

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

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

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