Top 100 Naomi Klein Quotes
#1. I think Naomi Klein was very astute with her book 'Shock Doctrine.' We make money on disaster.
Henry Rollins
#2. Companies like Nike already use Graffiti as a standard variety in their marketing campaigns and the first people who read Naomi Klein's 'No Logo' were marketing gurus who wanted to know what they shouldn't do.
Johannes Grenzfurthner
#3. What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands.
Billy Bragg
#4. Just when you thought multi-nationals and crazed consumerism were too big to fight, along comes Naomi Klein with facts, spirit, and news of successful fighters already out there. No Logo is an invigorating call to arms for everybody who wants to save money, justice, or the universe.
Gloria Steinem
#5. Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.
Naomi Klein
#6. 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
#7. In order to combat climate change, there's a real need to start localizing our economies
Naomi Klein
#8. From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.
Naomi Klein
#9. I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale.
Naomi Klein
#10. society has no choice but to take dramatic action to avert a collapse of civilization.
Naomi Klein
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. Renewables are, in fact, much more reliable than power based on extraction, since those energy models require continuous new inputs to avoid a crash, whereas once the initial investment has been made in renewable energy infrastructure, nature provides the raw materials for free.
Naomi Klein
#14. [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
#15. 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
#16. 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
#17. 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
#18. The International Energy Agency warns that if we do not get our emissions under control by a rather terrifying 2017, our fossil fuel economy will "lock-in" extremely dangerous warming.
Naomi Klein
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Democracy isn't the work of the market's invisible hand; it is the work of real hands.
Naomi Klein
#23. there has been a dramatic decrease in birth and survival rates of caribou calves. It seems that rising temperatures have changed the growing patterns of plants that are the source of critical energy for caribou calves, as well as for their mothers during reproduction and lactation.
Naomi Klein
#24. 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
#25. Communal forests around the world are being turned into privatized tree farms and preserves so their owners can collect something called "carbon credits," a lucrative scam I'll explore later.
Naomi Klein
#26. According to a 2009 Harvard Medical School study, as many as 45,000 people die annually in the United States because they lack health insurance. As one of the study's coauthors pointed out, this works out to about one death every twelve minutes. It's
Naomi Klein
#27. 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
#28. 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
#29. 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
#30. It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations - the list of ideological outrages goes on and
Naomi Klein
#31. 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
#32. I think there is a danger that an environmental crisis can be used in precisely the same way as the terrorist threat can be used in terms of giving up freedom.
Naomi Klein
#33. 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
#34. It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.
Naomi Klein
#35. We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. - George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Naomi Klein
#36. 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
#37. In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the "War on Terror" was a war against all obstacles to the new order.
Naomi Klein
#38. 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
#39. In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. - Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist, on his support for the invasion of Iraq2
Naomi Klein
#41. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.
Naomi Klein
#43. Dens of polar bears are collapsing in the thawing permafrost, which leaves tiny cubs dangerously exposed.25
Naomi Klein
#44. 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
#45. 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
#46. 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
#47. Anybody who claims that they know where this whole thing is all going is just lying.
Naomi Klein
#48. Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.
Naomi Klein
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. So the need for another economic model is urgent, and if the climate justice movement can show that responding to climate change is the best chance for a more just economic system ...
Naomi Klein
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. Ask him: History knocked on your door, did you answer?
Naomi Klein
#56. 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
#57. Building a livable world isn't rocket science; it's far more complex than that." - Ed Ayres
Naomi Klein
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. (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
#61. The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that 'justice is what love looks like in public.' I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.
Naomi Klein
#62. 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
#63. Step one for getting out of a hole: Stop digging. - KC Golden
Naomi Klein
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.
Naomi Klein
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. 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
#70. And up until quite recently, that has held up as the grand bargain of the carbon age: the people reaping the bulk of the benefits of extractivism pretend not to see the costs of that comfort so long as the sacrifice zones are kept safely out of view.
Naomi Klein
#71. 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
#72. Energy supply and environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit interests."14
Naomi Klein
#73. This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism's single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving.
Naomi Klein
#74. Droughts and floods create all kinds of business opportunities besides a growing demand for men with guns.
Naomi Klein
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.
Naomi Klein
#78. Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.
Naomi Klein
#79. climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet,
Naomi Klein
#80. They deny reality because the implications of that reality are, quite simply, unthinkable.
Naomi Klein
#81. 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
#82. Corporations have to be responsive to price signals. We are not public service.
Naomi Klein
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. They mean, quite simply, that climate change has become an existential crisis for the human species.
Naomi Klein
#86. 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
#87. There is no humane way to rule people against their will.
Naomi Klein
#88. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion.
Naomi Klein
#89. 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
#90. Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.
Naomi Klein
#91. The deeper message that is resonating with people is that it is possible to build. It is possible to invest in people; it is possible to invest in green infrastructure; it's possible to change.
Naomi Klein
#92. our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life.
Naomi Klein
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. 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
#97. 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
#98. We do not always respond to shocks with regression. Sometimes, in the face of crisis, we grow up - fast.
Naomi Klein
#99. 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
#100. It is our predicament that we live in a finite world, and yet we behave as if it were infinite.
Naomi Klein
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