Ralph Nader Quotes

Information is the currency of democracy. It's denial must always be suspect.

If you don't turn on to politics, politics will turn on you.

The true danger is the expansion of empire and the huge diversion of public budgets overseas at the neglect of domestic necessities, including, for example, a major public works program to employ millions of people. The Democrats want that. The Republicans may be pressured from back home to want it, but it hasn't happened yet under the Obama administration.

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.

Militaristic foreign policy is destroying America.

I think most Americans are ready for waging peace and not just brutalizing our foreign policy which is boomeranging against us.

[Jill Stein] don't have to engage in soundbites here as you may have experienced with some of the mass media.

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

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.

The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible.

End perverse incentives that reward Wall Street speculators.

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.

Secrecy destroys accountability.

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 deselect them.

Nothing short of a federal investigation can begin to disclose the abuses which have woven a fine web of mutually implicating relationships between businessmen and government officials.

I finally came to Washington. That's when something happened. The Motor Vehicle Act of 1966, even though it was irregularly enforced - sometimes very little under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan - it saved over 200,000 lives, millions of injuries prevented or reduced in severity.

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

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.

Ending police brutality and mass incarceration. There is a growing left-right support for criminal justice reform.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

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

That could be a high water mark for the Green Party in its history. What two states, I can only guess, aren't you going to be on because of horrendous obstacles to getting on the ballot.

For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.

I think most Americans are against illegal surveillance of their emails and telephone calls by the government.

If you're not turned on by politics, politics will turn on you.

We've got to get rid of this discrimination, this chilling, this bigotry toward gays and lesbians that are reflected in literally hundreds and hundreds of statutes and regulations in this country.

It is basically a strategy to destroy the essence of democracy, which is the competitiveness and choices of candidates on the ballot.

Once you don't vote your ideals ... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.

We have a Democratic Party that cannot defend the American people from the worst Republican Party in history because it's a Democratic Party of war and Wall Street.

Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn't even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.

Congress is the great enabler, constitutionally, for progressive society, and it's the great graveyard, the way it's been behaving, against a prosperous society, or another billionaire or two.

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

One 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.

Hillary Clinton is going to find common ground with the Republicans on foreign and military affairs. They both want to enhance the military budget.

The corporations have become our government. They're not just influential. Department by department, you name it, they put their people in high government positions, they have 10,000 PACs and 35,000 lobbyists, so there's no more opening to be heard.

Ninety-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.

Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans

If you know what's going on and know how society can be improved and happiness advanced, you tend to focus on how to get things done that will help health, safety, opportunity, justice, accountability of powerful institutions to the people they are supposed to serve.

The nation is faced with one of the most corporate-orientated anti-consumer Congresses in our history.

When I go up there, I see coal lobbyists, oil lobbyists, natural gas lobbyists, nuclear power lobbyists, somehow they think that's where the action is in Congress.

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

This country has been strip-mined by rich and powerful interests. If you dont like what they're doing, don't just sit there. Vote them out.

The various Social Security privatization schemes, full and partial, would cost both the 'social' - that is the public, cooperative, societal - element of the program and 'security' - the rock-solid income guarantee afforded by the system. It should be rejected.

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.

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

Obama & McCain differ, but neither takes on corporations.

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

For anybody here who's very worried about domestic priorities, just consider we have created, with this war on terrorism, more fighters, more countries embroiled. They're learning new weapons. They're learning new techniques. They're coming here in social media. The lone wolf thing is expanding. And once that blows here, then forget about domestic priorities.