63 Ralph Nader Quotes

Ralph Nader quotes

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

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Like knowing hostages, the AFL-CIO and its unions march in tandem to endorse the Democratic presidential nominees early in the primary season. They have given up their capacity for negotiation, so frightened are they of the Republicans. Meanwhile, the rank-and-file workers suffer their dwindling status in silence.

5. ...organized labor...rushes to support the party without demanding a turn away from corporatism toward workers' needs. This is the logic of the lesser of two evils. It tethers labor to a relentless slide deeper into the corporate power pits year after year.

6. ...the Democrats know that no matter how many GATTs, NAFTAs, empty OSHAs, and other betrayals...they heap on those labor leaders, they can be had because, once again, the Republicans are deemed worse.

7. The tired whine of 'But the Republicans are worse' will fall flat as more young Americans take charge of their future and move, with their reenergized elders, toward the Green Party and parallel civic and political movements.

8. We must strive to become good ancestors.

9. The shortcomings of America's political leaders do not stop at our borders.

10. Unlike members of Congress, Big Business knew what the WTO agreements contained. That's because corporate lobbyists helped draft them.

11. Half of democracy is about just showing up.

12. The 1963 Corvair, which has some remarkable characteristics. It's one of the few cars I know that can do the bossa nova on dry pavement and the watusi on wet.

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

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

15. Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

16. The goal of a just society is inseparable from love and beauty.

17. A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

18. There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

19. To the youth of America, I say, beware of being trivialized by the commercial culture that tempts you daily. I hear you saying often that you're not turned on to politics. The lessons of history are clear and portentous. If you do not turn on to politics, politics will turn on you.

20. 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.

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

22. Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.

23. Isn't it about time that the US government stop supporting dictatorships and avaricious oligarchies with our tax monies, munitions and diplomacy?

24. Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked.

25. The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.

26. Obviously, the answer to oil spills is to paper-train the tankers.

27. I've done it all. I'm thankful and proud of what I've accomplished in my life. I hope to keep doing it.

    Attribution disputed; shown as originally published.

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

29. For almost 70 years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.

30. John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.

31. If Microsoft's long record of deception and untrustworthiness is to be ended, the public remedies must be as bold, sweeping, and effective as the company's private power.

32. People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

33. The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.

34. The liberal intelligentsia has allowed its party to become a captive of corporate interests.

35. The networks are not some chicken-coop manufacturing lobby whose calls nobody returns.

36. The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That's the only difference.

37. Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.

38. 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 dis-elect them.

39. This administration is not sympathetic to corporations, it is indentured to corporations.

40. A seller-sovereign economy includes sellers who are monopolistic or oligopolistic without being confronted by the ultimate consumers who are organized in monopsonistic or ologopsonistic modes. It is an economy where enormous skill, artifice, and resources are used in getting consumers to buy what the sellers want to sell, notwithstanding the availability of more efficient, safe, economical, durable, and effective alternatives, including that of buying nothing at all.

41. Your best teacher is your last mistake.

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

43. Our founders did not oust George III in order for us to crown Richard I.

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

2. This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs.

3. 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.

4. In 2000 the majority of people wanted me and Buchanan on the debates in two thousand. And me on the debates in 2004. have there been any polls?

5. What we need to recognize, less than 1 percent of the people organized around issues that are already supported by conservatives and liberals, and there are a lot of them that aren't publicized, back home, can overcome corporate forces in Washington.

6. 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.

7. George W. Bush is very vulnerable but not if you campaign the way the major candidates - except for Dean and Kucinich - are campaigning.

8. In the meantime the big corporations are fleeing America for tax havens and places like Ireland, Luxembourg and the Grand Cayman Islands; the rich are finding more tax loopholes to expect; so when are the people going to basically roll up their sleeves and say, we've had enough, we're going to recapture Congress.

9. Full Medicare-for-all, free choice of doctor and hospital: that comes in sixty to seventy percent without even further explanation. And if you ever explained it, given all the trouble people are having qualifying and not qualifying for all these healthcare so-called insurance plans, it would go up even higher.

10. 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.

11. People have got to show up, showing up at meetings, rallies, marches, City Council, courtrooms. You've got to show up.

12. It is fascinating to watch legislators turn away from their usual corporate grips when they hear the growing thunder of the people.

13. In 2004 Professor Stephen Farnsworth, when I report saying that I got about five minutes on all the networks after Labor Day to election day: only five minutes even though I, like you, were representing majoritarian issues.

14. 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.

15. Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity ...

16. Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. All empires eventually destroy themselves. That's the record of history.

20. 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.'