Naomi Klein Quotes

Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.

Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.

Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.

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.

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?

The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale.

[On climate change:] What if it's all a hoax and we've created a better world for nothing?

Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.

In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.

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.

Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.

Anybody who claims that they know where this whole thing is all going is just lying.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.

But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.

What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.

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.

Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.

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.

The anti-war movement should turn itself into a pro-democracy movement

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.

Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.

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.

Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.

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.

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.

If enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one.

People without memory are putty.

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.

My favorite sign here 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.

The triumph of economic globalization has inspired a wave of techno-savvy investigative activists who are as globally minded as the corporations they track.

A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there's such a range of different kinds of market economies.

The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.

If you're not arguing, your coalition isn't wide enough.

Communication is my thing.

What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.

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.

[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.

The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity.

That's the big mistake the environmental movement made - 'We'll scare the hell out of you, and you'll become an activist'.