Naomi Klein Quotes

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

The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away, in which the inherent value of people and all life is foundational.

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.

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

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

Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.

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

We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.

In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.

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

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.

Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.

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

We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people's bodies, from communities, as if there's no limit, as if there's no consequence to how we're taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people's bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Anybody who claims that they know where this whole thing is all going is just lying.

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.

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.

The reason why nothing sticks to Trump - or very little sticks to Trump - is that Trump created his brand idea that has to do with being the guy who gets away from it. It's this ultimate power through wealth and this dream that represents in an age of tremendous economic precariousness and constrained options for so many people - that watching Trump be able to do whatever he wants to whoever he wants is this obvious vicarious kind of thrill for a certain demographic.