Ralph Nader Quotes

This (George W. Bush's) administration is not sympathetic to corporations, it is indentured to corporations

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.

Families are incubators for citizen activists.

I enjoy my work so much that I have to be pulled away from my work into leisure.

As a public interest lawyer, your fund of injustice will never be empty.

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

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.

The flow from knowledge to action draws upon the complete person with his or her catalyst and synergistic potential.

Word of mouth is the most effective means of communication.

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.

Hillary Clinton's ready to pick a fight with Putin. So are the Republicans.

Everything will be solar in 30 years.

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

The common belief that coaches must be abusive to be successful is a myth. Research shows that if you find a task fun, you'll perform better. If more coaches took . . . a Golden Rule approach to coaching, treating their players the way they themselves would like to be treated, fewer athletes would drop out of sports in their teens, and more athletes at every level would be happier and more satisfied.

There are very significant ways around America on how to break its grip, which is, of course, a way to exclude dissenting voices before tens of millions of people.

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

If you always vote for the lesser of two evils, you will always have evil, and you will always have less.

One time when I was nine or ten years old, I came home from school...and my dad said to me, 'Well, Ralph, what did you learn in school today? Did you learn how to believe or did you learn how to think?' So, I'm saying to myself, 'What's the difference between the two?'.

We have the most prolonged adolescence in the history of mankind. There is no other society that requires so many years to pass before people are grown up ... Adolescence is nurtured and prolonged by educational processes and by industry that has found a bonanza in embracing the adolescent population and fortifying 'adolescent values.' This prolongation of adolescence robs the country of the population group having the most risk takers, and the highest ideals.

If you're kept off the debates, you can't reach more two percent of people even if you campaign every state and fill the big conventions like Madison Square Garden.

Hillary Clinton's never seen a weapons system or a war she hasn't liked.

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

When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.

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

The lesser of two evils, or the least of the worst, is not good enough for the American people anymore.

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders.

I don't like too much by-standing, on-looking, and spectator-behavior in people's lives.

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

We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.

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.

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.

What's happening is that the will of the people, the declared opinion of the people, who want more agendas, more ideas, more sensible redirections reforms in our country, are being thwarted by the mechanism of keeping third-party candidates, who are on more than enough States theoretically to get an electoral vote majority, to keep them off the mass media, the commercial media, to keep them off the debates.

If they don't close these [nuclear] reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years.

The world is shaped by different people with certain personalities that come out of different upbringings.

We are practicing what we preach so that we may preach what we practice.

Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations.

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity.

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.

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.

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?

In this rigged, two-party system, third parties almost never win a national election. It's obvious what our function is in this constricted oligarchy of two corporate-indentured parties - to push hitherto taboo issues onto the public stage, to build for a future, to get a young generation in, keep the progressive agenda alive, push the two parties a little bit on this issue and that.

The civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.

You see that gap is exactly how they can marginalize and exclude people from giving the voters more voices and choices.

We have two parties who are basically hijacking our country for their corporate paymasters. And if we focus on 535 members of Congress, that's not all that many, we're going to see a fast turnaround. So focus all your concerns, all the information, the kind of agenda the Green Party has. Turn it right on your Senators and Representatives.

Companies like Enron have learned that small investments in endowing chairs, sponsoring research programs or hiring moonlighting professors can return big payoffs in generating books, reports, articles, testimony and other materials to push for and rationalize public policy positions that damage the public interest but benefit corporate bottomlines.

The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals.

If it is unpatriotic to tear down the flag, which is a symbol of the country, why isn't it more unpatriotic to desecrate the country itself-to pollute, despoil and ravage the air, land and sea.