Ralph Nader Quotes - Page 8

The civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.

The history of successful cases, some of which are in this museum, illustrates that often the regulators and legislatures don't wake up until some plaintiff gets a lawyers and digs out the cover-ups and the incriminating information about a safety defect in an automobile or another product.

What we have now is democracy without citizens. No one is on the public's side. All the buyers are on the corporations' side. And the bureaucrats in the Administration don't think the government belongs to the people.

George W. Bush is very vulnerable but not if you campaign the way the major candidates - except for Dean and Kucinich - are campaigning.

There's no better policy in a society then pursuing a health and safety of its people.

[Jill Stein] don't have to engage in soundbites here as you may have experienced with some of the mass media.

That could be a high water mark for the Green Party in its history. What two states, I can only guess, aren't you going to be on because of horrendous obstacles to getting on the ballot.

There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.

Let's not just look at it as taking votes away from Gore. Our support comes from a lot of people.

We don't measure whether an economy is developing. We just measure whether companies are selling more, whether inventories are up or down, not whether the health, safety and economic well-being of people are being advanced.

We've got to get rid of this discrimination, this chilling, this bigotry toward gays and lesbians that are reflected in literally hundreds and hundreds of statutes and regulations in this country.

The shortcomings of America's political leaders do not stop at our borders.

The corporations are worried about their reputational damage and a lot of the social media inflicts that, but it's hard to measure it.

Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?

I think most people would like that: probably comes in about ninety percent. They see their public works crumbling, services inadequate, they have libraries and schools and bridges and highways that have not been repaired.

I think George W. Bush's personality was overwhelmingly shaped in negative ways by his upbringing.

The networks are not some chicken-coop manufacturing lobby whose calls nobody returns.

The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.

What we need to recognize, less than 1 percent of the people organized around issues that are already supported by conservatives and liberals, and there are a lot of them that aren't publicized, back home, can overcome corporate forces in Washington.

Militaristic foreign policy is destroying America.

No presidential candidate should visit Las Vegas without condemning organized gambling.

In 2000 the majority of people wanted me and Buchanan on the debates in two thousand. And me on the debates in 2004. have there been any polls?

What's happening is that the will of the people, the declared opinion of the people, who want more agendas, more ideas, more sensible redirections reforms in our country, are being thwarted by the mechanism of keeping third-party candidates, who are on more than enough States theoretically to get an electoral vote majority, to keep them off the mass media, the commercial media, to keep them off the debates.

What's interesting is this election year has made the citizen groups off-limits. All these citizen groups? - local, state, national? - that really do things and improve the country, they're never asked to be in these electoral campaign discussions.

The nation is faced with one of the most corporate-orientated anti-consumer Congresses in our history.