Naomi Klein famous quotes

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

#Nike #Morning #School

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 Klein

#Science #Community #Political

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

#Opportunity #Climate #Historic

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

#Oil #People #Shakes

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

#Nike #Inspiration #Voice

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

#Religious #Ecosystems #Numbers

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 Klein

#War #Law #Humanity

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

#Freedom Of Speech #Cacophony #Free Speech

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

#Reality #Ideas #Diversity

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

#Political #Voting #Democracy

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

#Moving #Doors #Mirrors

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

#Way #Violence #Interest

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

#Moving #Law #Location

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

#People #Culture #Care

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

#Dream #Hero #Mirrors

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

#People

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

#Decision #Levels #Climate

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 Klein

#Atmosphere #Climate #Corporations

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

#Media #Giving #Political

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

#People #World #Climate

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

#Stress #Cities #Numbers

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

#Justice #Needs #Movement

People without memory are putty.
-- Naomi Klein

#Memories #People

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

#Fear #Hate #Vacuums

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

#Rich #Poor #Creditors

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

#Cutting #Age #Deregulation

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

#Zero #Rooms #Transformation

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 Klein

#Rocks #Challenges #Earth

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

#Today #Violence #Events

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

#Daughter #Mother #War

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

#Track #Politics #Corporations

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.
-- Naomi Klein

#Space #Kind #Absence

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

#What If #World #Hoaxes

It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.
-- Naomi Klein

#Reality #Climate #Libertarian

Like Russia's gangsterism and Bush's cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.
-- Naomi Klein

#Years #Iraq #Russia

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

#Party #Gains #Shows

Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as "superconsumers," able to carry consumer demand all on their own.
-- Naomi Klein

#Wall #Demand #Able

protected businesses never, never become competitive ... Halliburton, Bechtel, Parsons, KPMG, RTI, Blackwater and all other U.S. corporations that were in Iraq to take advantage of the reconstruction were part of a vast protectionist racket whereby the U.S. government had created their markets with war, barred their competitors from even entering the race, then paid them to do the work, while guaranteeing them a profit to boot - all at taxpayer expense.
-- Naomi Klein

#War #Government #Iraq

Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn't. You can't unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons' sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That's just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that's what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.
-- Naomi Klein

#War #Army #Cowboy

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.
-- Naomi Klein

#Sky #Limits #Empty

And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.
-- Naomi Klein

#Home #Weather #Events

This same economic system, based on short-term growth and endless profits is also the reason for pretty much everything else that is lousy in our society, from private prisons to Fox News. What I'm arguing is that, in fact, what we've been told is a lie.
-- Naomi Klein

#Lying #Growth #News

It is eminently possible to have a market-based economy that requires no such brutality and demands no such ideological purity. A free market in consumer products can coexist with free public health care, with public schools, with a large segment of the economy -- like a national oil company -- held in state hands. It's equally possible to require corporations to pay decent wages, to respect the right of workers to form unions, and for governments to tax and redistribute wealth so that the sharp inequalities that mark the corporatist state are reduced. Markets need not be fundamentalist.
-- Naomi Klein

#School #Government #Hands

Terrorism doesn't just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.
-- Naomi Klein

#Real #Blow #Rights

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

#Powerful #Nihilism #Delicacy

I see The Gap ads as being a great example of how branding has changed. Those Gap campaigns are pop culture. They've been incredibly powerful. They have had the kind of effect on culture that a hit band has. Just look at The Gap's Khaki swing ads, which were music videos. They had this tremendous impact on the industry - suddenly everything started looking like Gap ads and it became difficult to know who was co-opting whom and who was creating culture.
-- Naomi Klein

#Powerful #Swings #Creating

Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.
-- Naomi Klein

#Resistance #Arms #Information

Real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.
-- Naomi Klein

#Real #Agriculture #Community

It has no denim-toned house paint. Levi makes what is essentially a commodity: blue jeans. Its ads may evoke rugged outdoorsmanship, but Levi hasn't promoted any particular life style to sell other products.
-- Naomi Klein

#Blue #Jeans #House

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

#Community #Spirituality #Brands

So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.
-- Naomi Klein

#Fate #Our World #Choices

The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically - prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.
-- Naomi Klein

#Games #Expectations #Roles

Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.
-- Naomi Klein

#Sprung

Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material,.
-- Naomi Klein

#Artist #People #Culture

It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.
-- Naomi Klein

#People #Community #Balance

And most of all, it means continually drawing connections among these seemingly disparate struggles—asserting, for instance, that the logic that would cut pensions, food stamps, and health care before increasing taxes on the rich is the same logic that would blast the bedrock of the earth to get the last vapors of gas and the last drops of oil before making the shift to renewable energy.
-- Naomi Klein

#Struggle #Mean #Cutting

And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.
-- Naomi Klein

#Real #Goal #Magic

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.
-- Naomi Klein

#War #Fighting #Thinking

One of the most disturbing ways that climate change is already playing out is through what ecologists call "mismatch" or "mistiming." This is the process whereby warming causes animals to fall out of step with a critical food source, particularly at breeding times, when a failure to find enough food can lead to rapid population losses.
-- Naomi Klein

#Food #Fall #Loss

Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude-that moment being the tail end of the go-go '80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.
-- Naomi Klein

#Nature #War #Science

If this really is true, then greed really isn't good, after all. It really isn't the way to maximize the best possible outcome. We really do need to come together and act collectively. Government isn't always the problem. It's sometimes the solution. And, so their whole intellectual scaffolding collapses. So, they'd rather deny the science.
-- Naomi Klein

#Government #Greed #Intellectual

It doesn't have the ability to think rationally this economic model. It thinks like a drug addict: 'Where can I get my next fix?' It doesn't learn wisely. Any kind of measure of natural wisdom would be: you make a mistake, you correct it the next time around. But a drug addict feels terrible... and then says: 'I want more'. Unfortunately we have an economic model that thinks like a crack addict.
-- Naomi Klein

#Mistake #Thinking #Drug

The net is more than an organizing tool - it has become an organizing model, a blueprint for decentralized but cooperative decision-making. It facilitates the process of information sharing to such an extent that many groups can work in concert with one another without the need to achieve monolithic consensus.
-- Naomi Klein

#Decision #Needs #Tools

GLHR... has used Greenpeace-style media antics to draw more public attention to the plight of sweatshop workers than the multimillion - dollar international trade union movement has achieved in almost a century.
-- Naomi Klein

#Media #Impact #Style

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

#Men #White #Our World

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

#War #Democracy #Movement

Because it is such a huge crisis, because it puts us on a firm science-based deadline, it's a once-in-a-century opportunity to build a better society and address raging inequality, create huge numbers of jobs, rebuild our public infrastructure. But, we can't do it unless we break every single rule in the free-market playbook. Which is why the worst people in the world all deny climate change.
-- Naomi Klein

#Jobs #Opportunity #Numbers