Kalle Lasn famous quotes

Last updated: Sep 5, 2024

America, the great liberator, is in desperate need of being liberated from itself -- from its own excesses and arrogance. And the world needs to be liberated from American values and culture, spreading across the planet as if by divine providence.
-- Kalle Lasn

#America #Arrogance #Needs
In the Soviet Union you weren't allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Government #Unions #Speak
We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Ocean #Cutting #Past
Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Rights #Fiction #Corporations
A meme (rhymes with dream) is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Dream #Fashion #Philosophy
Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Mother #Environmental #Firsts
American culture is no longer created by the people... A free, authentic life is no longer possible in AmericaTM today. We are being manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very fabric of our existence. Most North Americans now live designer lives-sleep, eat, sit in car, work, shop, watch TV, sleep again. I doubt there's more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle. We ourselves have been branded.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Sleep #Media #Car
All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us-by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Song #Agency #Singing
The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment
-- Kalle Lasn

#Media #Environment #Factories
I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Powerful #Believe #Aesthetics
Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for non-smoking areas ten years ago.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Air #Years #Water
Amming a coin into a monopoly newspaper box or liberating a billboard in the middle of the night can be a rather honest and joyful thing to do.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Night #Coins #Honest
There's some idea there, and the power of it comes from the fact that most of the time you'll never be able to answer what it is. It's just there. It's just a magic moment that you can feel in your gut that it's there, and you're willing to go there and sleep there and go through the hardship and fight for it. Once you start answering it too clearly then the magic is gone.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Sleep #Fighting #Ideas
I want to live in a world where human beings, not corporate entities, create the future.
-- Kalle Lasn

#World #Want #Entity
In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Ecological #Marketplace
The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Machines #Economy #Doomsday
It's a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it.
-- Kalle Lasn

#Depth #Economy #Break

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