If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, weโd be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today.
Ralph NaderIt is basically a strategy to destroy the essence of democracy, which is the competitiveness and choices of candidates on the ballot.
Ralph NaderNinety-seven percent of the CEOs of the Fortune 500 are white men, and what they do radiates all the way down into poor areas and cities around our country. Like predatory lending and misallocation of municipal services. These guys get municipal service, poor areas don't. So they run the economy into the ground, and who suffers the most? The poor pay more and they die earlier.
Ralph NaderOne day at Princeton, I noticed there were dead birds on the pavement between the campus buildings, where very large trees were. It turns out it was DDT. At the time, in the early '50s, no one thought DDT was dangerous to anybody but insects. I went down to the Daily Princetonian, the college paper, and tried to persuade them to do a story. They said, "Naw, there's nothing wrong." But that taught me a very important lesson. One, that newspaper people can get very jaded. Second, that you might know something, like an expert chemistry professor, you are not going to apply what you know.
Ralph Nader