Ralph Nader Quotes - Page 6

The corporations don't like open courts of law, trials by jury. They want to privatize by pushing people into compulsory arbitration where they win most of the time and the whole process is pretty secret.

For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.

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

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.

The debate corporation is a corporation. It's funded by corporations. It's relayed by media corporations to the public. It's created by the two parties, which are corporations. We should have public presidential debates all over America run by public institutions.

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.

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

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.

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.

A citizenship of wholesale delegation and abdication to public and private power systems, such as prevails now, makes such periodic checks as elections little more than rituals.

You [Jill Stein] want to do something about student debt. And that affects conservative and liberal students. That's going to be a majoritarian position.

You [Jill Stein] also believe in a full employment policy that was the majority Democratic Party policy in 1946. They actually passed a law to that effect. You want to end poverty and when people see how relatively easy it is to end poverty. And one way is to increase the minimum wage: catch up; it's been frozen for so many years.

Fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage. That was one of the reasons why so many people flocked to Bernie Sanders candidacy.

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

There are very significant ways around America on how to break its grip, which is, of course, a way to exclude dissenting voices before tens of millions of people.

Our founders did not oust George III in order for us to crown Richard I.

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.

As I was saying, half a democracy is showing up and people have got not only to agree with this agenda, some of these third parties listeners, they've got to show up.

Full Medicare-for-all, free choice of doctor and hospital: that comes in sixty to seventy percent without even further explanation. And if you ever explained it, given all the trouble people are having qualifying and not qualifying for all these healthcare so-called insurance plans, it would go up even higher.

This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies.

You see that gap is exactly how they can marginalize and exclude people from giving the voters more voices and choices.

I don't like too much by-standing, on-looking, and spectator-behavior in people's lives.

In 2004 Professor Stephen Farnsworth, when I report saying that I got about five minutes on all the networks after Labor Day to election day: only five minutes even though I, like you, were representing majoritarian issues.

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.

I suppose the Green Party doesn't care for the anti-civil libertarian provisions of the notoriously named Patriot Act, invading privacy, and being able to search your home, and not tell you for 72 hours.