Ralph Nader Quotes - Page 3

If God hadn't meant for us to eat sugar, he wouldn't have invented dentists.

The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment.

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.

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.

We're trying to convey how much easier it is than most people think, especially young people, to turn the country around if they focus on the levers, if they focus on Congress, and state legislatures.

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

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.

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

Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.

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.

Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans

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

The accountability of government has gone to the point where the very use of the law is the instrument of illegality.

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?'.

I hear people who are worried about climate change tell me, oh, Congress that's gridlock, that's not where the action is.

The food industry, its trade associations, and research foundations, is well financed and highly organized to pressure the FDA.

President [ Dwight] Eisenhower warned us, five star general, he said watch out for the military-industrial complex. That's a threat to our freedom, to our economy, and what we have now is a gigantic taxpayer draining empire that is devouring itself, which, as you say, it's creating more resistance, more fighting, against us oversees.

Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power.

Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.

Washington DC is corporate-occupied territory.

Nothing can stop the power of an informed citizenry when it is empowered, organized, and motivated.

That's why I call the Senate the graveyard of democracy, because even when you have 58 senators, they can block it and block it and block it.

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

It is fascinating to watch legislators turn away from their usual corporate grips when they hear the growing thunder of the people.