Top 100 Ralph Nader Quotes
#1. I don't like too much by-standing, on-looking, and spectator-behavior in people's lives.
Ralph Nader
#2. 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.
Ralph Nader
#3. For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.
Ralph Nader
#4. Power has to be insecure to be responsive.
Ralph Nader
#5. 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.
Ralph Nader
#6. The accountability of government has gone to the point where the very use of the law is the instrument of illegality.
Ralph Nader
#7. The lesser of two evils, or the least of the worst, is not good enough for the American people anymore.
Ralph Nader
#8. The networks are not some chicken-coop manufacturing lobby whose calls nobody returns.
Ralph Nader
#9. 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.
Ralph Nader
#10. No presidential candidate should visit Las Vegas without condemning organized gambling.
Ralph Nader
#11. 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.
Ralph Nader
#12. The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.
Ralph Nader
#13. We must strive to become good ancestors.
Ralph Nader
#14. National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.
Ralph Nader
#15. 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.
Ralph Nader
#16. The food industry, its trade associations, and research foundations, is well financed and highly organized to pressure the FDA.
Ralph Nader
#17. People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.
Ralph Nader
#18. 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.
Ralph Nader
#19. 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.
Ralph Nader
#20. Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked.
Ralph Nader
#21. She was the light of our lives, our anchor, compass and vision.
Ralph Nader
#22. By the time you rise through the ranks, the culture of homogenization has bred the spirit and imagination out of you.
Ralph Nader
#23. We are practicing what we preach so that we may preach what we practice.
Ralph Nader
#24. A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.
Ralph Nader
#25. 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.
Ralph Nader
#26. George W. Bush is very vulnerable but not if you campaign the way the major candidates - except for Dean and Kucinich - are campaigning.
Ralph Nader
#27. This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies.
Ralph Nader
#28. Families are incubators for citizen activists.
Ralph Nader
#29. 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?
Ralph Nader
#30. I think George W. Bush's personality was overwhelmingly shaped in negative ways by his upbringing.
Ralph Nader
#31. If you're not turned on by politics, politics will turn on you.
Ralph Nader
#32. 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.
Ralph Nader
#33. Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.
Ralph Nader
#34. The civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.
Ralph Nader
#35. LOST: 60 SECONDS
DON'T BOTHER LOOKING FOR THEM BECAUSE THEY ARE GONE FOREVER
Ralph Nader
#36. When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.
Ralph Nader
#37. 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.
Ralph Nader
#38. The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights ... have pressured retailers on campus and off to publicly disclose the factory names and addresses.
Ralph Nader
#39. Our founders did not oust George III in order for us to crown Richard I.
Ralph Nader
#40. 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.
Ralph Nader
#41. 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.
Ralph Nader
#42. The flow from knowledge to action draws upon the complete person with his or her catalyst and synergistic potential.
Ralph Nader
#43. If they don't close these [nuclear] reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years.
Ralph Nader
#44. We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.
Ralph Nader
#45. 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.
Ralph Nader
#46. The liberal intelligentsia has allowed its party to become a captive of corporate interests.
Ralph Nader
#47. Your best teacher is your last mistake.
Ralph Nader
#48. The shortcomings of America's political leaders do not stop at our borders.
Ralph Nader
#49. 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.
Ralph Nader
#50. Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.
Ralph Nader
#51. If you don't turn on to politics, politics will turn on you.
Ralph Nader
#52. 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.
Ralph Nader
#53. 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.
Ralph Nader
#54. A society with more justice needs less charity.
Ralph Nader
#56. The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals.
Ralph Nader
#57. 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.
Ralph Nader
#58. 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.
Ralph Nader
#59. 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.
Ralph Nader
#60. When strangers start acting like neighbors ... communities are reinvigorated.
Ralph Nader
#61. 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.
Ralph Nader
#62. The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
Ralph Nader
#63. As a public interest lawyer, your fund of injustice will never be empty.
Ralph Nader
#64. Information is the currency of democracy. It's denial must always be suspect.
Ralph Nader
#65. The various Social Security privatization schemes, full and partial, would cost both the 'social' - that is the public, cooperative, societal - element of the program and 'security' - the rock-solid income guarantee afforded by the system. It should be rejected.
Ralph Nader
#66. This (George W. Bush's) administration is not sympathetic to corporations, it is indentured to corporations
Ralph Nader
#67. 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.'
Ralph Nader
#68. 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.
Ralph Nader
#69. 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.
Ralph Nader
#70. The Function of Leadership is to produce more Leaders, Not more Followers.
Ralph Nader
#71. I enjoy my work so much that I have to be pulled away from my work into leisure.
Ralph Nader
#72. 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.
Ralph Nader
#73. The financial wealth of the top 1 percent of households in the U.S. exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent.
Ralph Nader
#74. Washington DC is corporate-occupied territory.
Ralph Nader
#75. The world is shaped by different people with certain personalities that come out of different upbringings.
Ralph Nader
#76. The whole story of human history is: The blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.
Ralph Nader
#77. 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.
Ralph Nader
#78. 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.
Ralph Nader
#79. John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.
Ralph Nader
#80. 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.
Ralph Nader
#81. Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans
Ralph Nader
#82. A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.
Ralph Nader
#83. Once you don't vote your ideals ... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.
Ralph Nader
#84. Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism.
Ralph Nader
#85. 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.
Ralph Nader
#86. 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.
Ralph Nader
#87. This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs.
Ralph Nader
#88. The nation is faced with one of the most corporate-orientated anti-consumer Congresses in our history.
Ralph Nader
#89. Family values stand up to injustice and power outside the household.
Ralph Nader
#90. 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.
Ralph Nader
#91. 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?
Ralph Nader
#92. Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity ...
Ralph Nader
#93. 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.
Ralph Nader
#94. People are interested in family traditions, and I think a lot of families can benefit from some of the ways that my parents dealt with the challenges of raising four kids.
Ralph Nader
#95. It is fascinating to watch legislators turn away from their usual corporate grips when they hear the growing thunder of the people.
Ralph Nader
#96. There's no better policy in a society then pursuing a health and safety of its people.
Ralph Nader
#97. The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible.
Ralph Nader
#98. There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.
Ralph Nader
#100. Gates's net wealth is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40% of Americans (112,000,000 people).
Ralph Nader
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