Top 100 Naomi Klein Quotes
#1. Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.
Naomi Klein
#2. Rather than allowing subway and bus fares to rise while service erodes, we need to be lowering prices and expanding services - regardless of the costs. Public
Naomi Klein
#3. In order to combat climate change, there's a real need to start localizing our economies
Naomi Klein
#4. From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.
Naomi Klein
#5. Coal, in truth, stands not beside but entirely above all other commodities. It is the material energy of the country - the universal aid - the factor in everything we do." - William Stanley Jevons, economist, 1865
Naomi Klein
#6. Even climate action at home looks suspiciously like socialism to them; all the calls for high-density affordable housing and brand-new public transit are obviously just ways to give backdoor subsidies to the undeserving poor.
Naomi Klein
#7. [O]urs is a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us as well as the future we are shaping with our actions.
Naomi Klein
#8. My favorite sign says, 'I care about you.' In a culture that trains people to avoid each other's gaze, to say 'Let them die,' that is a deeply radical statement.
Naomi Klein
#9. When Nike says, just do it, that's a message of empowerment. Why aren't the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?
Naomi Klein
#10. I stopped avoiding the articles and the scientific studies and read everything I could find. I also stopped outsourcing the problem to the environmentalists, stopped telling myself this was somebody else's issue, somebody else's job.
Naomi Klein
#11. The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away, in which the inherent value of people and all life is foundational.
Naomi Klein
#12. The triumph of economic globalization has inspired a wave of techno-savvy investigative activists who are as globally minded as the corporations they track.
Naomi Klein
#13. As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective.
Naomi Klein
#14. Democracy isn't the work of the market's invisible hand; it is the work of real hands.
Naomi Klein
#15. Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.
Naomi Klein
#16. Political solutions-accountable to the people and enforceable by their elected representatives- deserve another shot before we throw in the towel and settle for corporate codes, independent monitors and the privatisation of our collective rights as citizens.
Naomi Klein
#17. In Argentina, urban poverty plummeted from 54.7 percent in 2003 to 6.5 percent in 2011, according to government data collected by the U.N.
Naomi Klein
#18. Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing "climate-ready" crops - seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta.
Naomi Klein
#19. Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.
Naomi Klein
#20. According to these new rules, the U.S. government was free to use the methods it had developed in the 1950s under layers of secrecy and deniability - only now it was out in the open, without fear of prosecution.
Naomi Klein
#21. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.
Naomi Klein
#22. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Naomi Klein
#23. changing the earth's climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.
Naomi Klein
#24. Like so much of cool hunting, Hilfiger's marketing journey feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.
Naomi Klein
#27. Their lands as a result of our actions (and inactions), our governments will build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt even more draconian anti-immigration laws. And, in the name of
Naomi Klein
#28. It has no denim-toned house paint. Levi makes what is essentially a commodity: blue jeans. Its ads may evoke rugged outdoorsmanship, but Levi hasn't promoted any particular life style to sell other products.
Naomi Klein
#29. Most of you didn't think that helping people share books would be a subversive act ... Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical.
Naomi Klein
#30. Anybody who claims that they know where this whole thing is all going is just lying.
Naomi Klein
#31. Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.
Naomi Klein
#32. If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though. The relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is trivial by comparison.
Naomi Klein
#33. In short, we have reached what some activists have started calling "Decade Zero" of the climate crisis: we either change now or we lose our chance.29
Naomi Klein
#34. That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution - a problem it dealt with by changing the laws.
Naomi Klein
#35. The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren't there.
Naomi Klein
#36. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!
Naomi Klein
#37. Ask him: History knocked on your door, did you answer?
Naomi Klein
#38. Global reinsurance companies are making billions in profits, in part by selling new kinds of protection schemes to developing countries that have done almost nothing to create the climate crisis, but whose infrastructure is intensely vulnerable to its impacts.8
Naomi Klein
#39. Building a livable world isn't rocket science; it's far more complex than that." - Ed Ayres
Naomi Klein
#40. Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material,.
Naomi Klein
#41. Right now, the triumph of market logic, with its ethos of domination and fierce competition, is paralyzing almost all serious efforts to respond to climate change.
Naomi Klein
#42. (According to The New York Times, "the top 20 service contractors have spent nearly $300 million since 2000 on lobbying and have donated $23 million to political campaigns." The Bush administration, in turn, increased the amount spent on contractors by roughly $200 billion between 2000 and 2006.)
Naomi Klein
#43. The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.
Naomi Klein
#44. Step one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging. - KC Golden
Naomi Klein
#45. Scott Bedbury, Starbucks' vice president of marketing, openly recognized that "consumers don't truly believe there's a huge difference between products," which is why brands must "establish emotional ties" with their customers
Naomi Klein
#46. There is a direct and compelling relationship between the dominance of the values that are intimately tied to triumphant capitalism and the presence of anti-environment views and behaviors.
Naomi Klein
#47. It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.
Naomi Klein
#48. A 2013 study by Riley Dunlap and political scientist Peter Jacques found that a striking 72 percent of climate denial books, mostly published since the 1990s, were linked to right-wing think tanks, a figure that rises to 87 percent if self-published books (increasingly common) are excluded.23
Naomi Klein
#49. The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly - whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"36
Naomi Klein
#50. Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.
Naomi Klein
#51. Energy supply and environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit interests."14
Naomi Klein
#52. Droughts and floods create all kinds of business opportunities besides a growing demand for men with guns.
Naomi Klein
#53. We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
Naomi Klein
#54. In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.
Naomi Klein
#55. Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.
Naomi Klein
#56. Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.
Naomi Klein
#57. climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet,
Naomi Klein
#58. They deny reality because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable.
Naomi Klein
#59. Indeed, the failure of our political leaders to even attempt to ensure a safe future for us represents a crisis of legitimacy of almost unfathomable proportions.
Naomi Klein
#60. Corporations have to be responsive to price signals. We are not public service.
Naomi Klein
#61. Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.5
Naomi Klein
#62. Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings.
Naomi Klein
#63. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species.
Naomi Klein
#64. There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation.
Naomi Klein
#65. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message - spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions - telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.
Naomi Klein
#66. Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.
Naomi Klein
#67. our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.
Naomi Klein
#68. One of the main ways in which I get attacked is by being called a conspiracy theorist by the right and the other main attack is actually from the conspiracy theorists who are really pissed at me for not admitting that 9/11 was an inside job.
Naomi Klein
#69. Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.
Naomi Klein
#70. It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.
Naomi Klein
#71. Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.
Naomi Klein
#72. A 2007 Harris poll found that 71 percent of Americans believed that the continued burning of fossil fuels would alter the climate. By 2009 the figure had dropped to 51 percent. In June 2011 the number was down to 44 percent - well
Naomi Klein
#73. We do not always respond to shocks with regression. Sometimes, in the face of crisis, we grow up - fast.
Naomi Klein
#74. The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas comes out." - Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 20131
Naomi Klein
#75. It is our predicament that we live in a finite world, and yet we behave as if it were infinite.
Naomi Klein
#76. Hunger isn't about the amount of food around - it's about being able to afford and control that food. After all, the U.S. has more food than it knows what to do with, and still 50 million people are food insecure.
Naomi Klein
#77. the solution to global warming is not to fix the world, it is to fix ourselves.
Naomi Klein
#78. It's impossible to say how much the decision to use the tsunami as an opportunity for disaster capitalism contributed to the return to civil war.
Naomi Klein
#79. In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.
Naomi Klein
#80. To the extent people prioritize values and goals such as achievement, money, power, status and image, they tend to hold more negative attitudes towards the environment, are less likely to engage in positive environmental behaviors, and are more likely to use natural resources unsustainably,
Naomi Klein
#81. Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.
Naomi Klein
#82. Arctic tern chicks are starving to death for similar reasons: they rely on small fish that have fled for colder waters.
Naomi Klein
#83. Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own.
Naomi Klein
#84. This is not the time to be looking for ways to dismiss a nascent movement against the power of capital, but to do the opposite: to find ways to embrace it, support it and help it grow into its enormous potential. With so much at stake, cynicism is a luxury we simply cannot afford.
Naomi Klein
#85. Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
Naomi Klein
#86. We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.
Naomi Klein
#87. A great many of us engage in this kind of climate change denial. We look for a split second and then we look away. Or we look but then turn it into a joke ("more signs of the Apocalypse!"). Which is another way of looking away.
Naomi Klein
#88. When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.
Naomi Klein
#89. It's not yet clear which side will win many of the struggles outlined in these pages - only that the companies in the crosshairs are up against far more than they bargained for. There have, however, already been some solid victories, too many to fully catalogue here.
Naomi Klein
#90. Right now capitalism is winning hands down. It wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, or for breaking emission reduction commitments already made.
Naomi Klein
#91. I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back.
Naomi Klein
#92. GLHR ... has used Greenpeace-style media antics to draw more public attention to the plight of sweatshop workers than the multimillion - dollar international trade union movement has achieved in almost a century.
Naomi Klein
#93. The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.
Naomi Klein
#94. What if it's all a hoax and we've created a better world for nothing?
Naomi Klein
#95. The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.
Naomi Klein
#97. So, if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid.
Naomi Klein
#98. You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality
not at the same time as you're bombing people, you can't.
Naomi Klein
#99. The climate change denial movement - far from an organic convergence of "skeptical" scientists - is entirely a creature of the ideological network on display here, the very one that deserves the bulk of the credit for redrawing the global ideological map over the last four decades.
Naomi Klein
#100. The tsunami that cleared the shoreline like a giant bulldozer has presented developers with an undreamed-of opportunity, and they have moved quickly to seize it. - Seth Mydans, International Herald Tribune, March 10,
Naomi Klein
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