Ralph Nader Quotes

“Power has to be insecure to be responsive.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

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

“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 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 civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.”

“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.”

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

“Families are incubators for citizen activists.”

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

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

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

“Washington DC is corporate-occupied territory.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.'”

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

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

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

“There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.”

“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.”

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

“Secrecy destroys accountability.”

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

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.'”

“Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity.”

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