Naomi Klein Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
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“Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi's and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.”
-- Naomi KleinSource : Naomi Klein (2014). “This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate”, p.18, Simon and Schuster
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“I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale.”
-- Naomi KleinSource : Naomi Klein (2014). “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate”, p.10, Simon and Schuster
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“Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.”
-- Naomi KleinSource : FaceBook post by Naomi Klein from Feb 23, 2011
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“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?”
-- Naomi Klein -
“The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system--whether political, religious or economic--that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain "indicator species" of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity's use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature”
-- Naomi KleinSource : Naomi Klein (2014). “This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate”, p.21, Simon and Schuster
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“Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.”
-- Naomi KleinSource : Naomi Klein (2000). “No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies”, Vintage Canada
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“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.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.”
-- Naomi Klein -
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“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.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“My favorite sign 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.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn't show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“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.”
-- Naomi Klein -
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“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.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.”
-- Naomi KleinSource : "Naomi Klein on Capitalism and Climate Change". "Moyers & Company" with Bill Moyers, billmoyers.com. November 15, 2012.
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“We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because these things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism… We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe–and would benefit the vast majority–are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.”
-- Naomi Klein -
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“Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“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...”
-- Naomi Klein -
“Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.”
-- Naomi KleinSource : "From pots to politics" by Naomi Klein, www.theguardian.com. May 12, 2003.
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“Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age-privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending-are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“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.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.”
-- Naomi KleinSource : Naomi Klein (2014). “This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate”, p.285, Simon and Schuster
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“The creation of today's market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.”
-- Naomi Klein -
“Fury is an entirely appropriate response to a system that sends young people to kill other young people in a war that never should have been waged. Yet the American Right is forever trying to pathologise anger as something menacing and abnormal, dismissing war opponents as hateful and, in the latest slur, wild-eyed. This is much harder to do when victims of wars begin to speak for themselves: no one questions the wildness in the eyes of a mother or father who has just lost a son or daughter, or the fury of a soldier who knows that he is being asked to kill, and to die, needlessly.”
-- Naomi Klein
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