Ralph Nader famous quotes

Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.
-- Ralph Nader

#Country #Jail #People

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.
-- Ralph Nader

#Freedom #Democracy #Citizenship

We must strive to become good ancestors.
-- Ralph Nader

#Strive #Ancestor

The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.
-- Ralph Nader

#Inspirational #Motivational #Inspiring

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
-- Ralph Nader

#Fun #Oil #Earth Day

A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.
-- Ralph Nader

#Inspirational #Motivational #Success

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.
-- Ralph Nader

#Inspiration #Justice #Charity

The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That's the only difference.
-- Ralph Nader

#Party #Doors #Differences

Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses…in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them.
-- Ralph Nader

#Loss #Government #Able

I once said to my father, when I was a boy, 'Dad we need a third political party.' He said to me, 'I'll settle for a second.'
-- Ralph Nader

#Dad #Father #Party

Your best teacher is your last mistake.
-- Ralph Nader

#Success #Teacher #Retirement

Since I was a law student, I have been against the death penalty. It does not deter. It is severely discriminatory against minorities, especially since they're given no competent legal counsel defense in many cases. It's a system that has to be perfect. You cannot execute one innocent person. No system is perfect. And to top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics it, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole
-- Ralph Nader

#Law #Perfect #Minorities

When strangers start acting like neighbors... communities are reinvigorated.
-- Ralph Nader

#Community #Brotherhood #Acting

Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.
-- Ralph Nader

#Wife #Feminist #House

National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.
-- Ralph Nader

#Information #Leafs #Figs

The flow from knowledge to action draws upon the complete person with his or her catalyst and synergistic potential.
-- Ralph Nader

#Flow #Action #Catalyst

General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it.
-- Ralph Nader

#Money #Delaware #Willing

This country has been strip-mined by rich and powerful interests. If you dont like what they're doing, don't just sit there. Vote them out.
-- Ralph Nader

#Country #Powerful #Dignity

Justice needs money; it always has . . . whether for abolition of slavery and early women's rights movements or the civil rights and environmental drives of our generation.
-- Ralph Nader

#Our Generation #Rights #Justice

The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington and meets with the puppet in the White House. He then goes down Pennsylvania Avenue and meets with the puppets in Congress. The Israeli leader then 'brings back millions of dollars' in aid to Israel.
-- Ralph Nader

#Israel #White #Leader

The clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.
-- Ralph Nader

#Power #Government #People

For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.
-- Ralph Nader

#People #Sorrow #Half

Obviously, the answer to oil spills is to paper-train the tankers.
-- Ralph Nader

#Oil #Answers #Paper

To top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole.
-- Ralph Nader

#Cost #Execution #Doe

We have the most prolonged adolescence in the history of mankind. There is no other society that requires so many years to pass before people are grown up ... Adolescence is nurtured and prolonged by educational processes and by industry that has found a bonanza in embracing the adolescent population and fortifying 'adolescent values.' This prolongation of adolescence robs the country of the population group having the most risk takers, and the highest ideals.
-- Ralph Nader

#Country #Educational #Years

Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations.
-- Ralph Nader

#Struggle #Vacation #Justice

This policy represents a massive injustice against Iraqi civilians, ... and it must be ended - not after Mr. Clinton leaves office, but now.
-- Ralph Nader

#Office #Injustice #Clinton

Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism.
-- Ralph Nader

#Competition #Socialism #Figs

This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs.
-- Ralph Nader

#Waste #Dollars #Environment

Ford Motor Company's sluggish and piecemeal approach to its automotive responsibilities betrays motorists' safety.
-- Ralph Nader

#Betrayal #Responsibility #Safety

Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans
-- Ralph Nader

#Inspirational #Republican #Democrat

Is there a number or mark planned for the hand or forehead in a new cashless society? YES, and I have seen the machines that are now ready to put it into operation.
-- Ralph Nader

#Numbers #America #Hands

Members of Congress are like the voters in one respect -- they want to go with the winners.
-- Ralph Nader

#Want #Voters #Winner

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.
-- Ralph Nader

#Dark #Age #Abdication

The Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights... have pressured retailers on campus and off to publicly disclose the factory names and addresses.
-- Ralph Nader

#Rights #Names #Impact

Things have gotten so bad in this country, you look back at Richard Nixon with nostalgia.
-- Ralph Nader

#Country #Looks #Nostalgia

Word of mouth is the most effective means of communication.
-- Ralph Nader

#Communication #Mean #Mouths

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

#Dark #Fda #Age

Everything will be solar in 30 years.
-- Ralph Nader

#Years #Energy #Environment

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.
-- Ralph Nader

#Years #People #Democracy

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

#Las Vegas #Gambling #Presidential

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

#Return #Chickens

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

#People #Support #Looks

John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.
-- Ralph Nader

#Names #Oil #Media

The liberal intelligentsia has allowed its party to become a captive of corporate interests.
-- Ralph Nader

#Party #Interest

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.
-- Ralph Nader

#Insecure

I don't think meals have any business being deductible. I'm for separation of calories and corporations.
-- Ralph Nader

#Business #Thinking #Meals

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust.
-- Ralph Nader

#Party #Government #Order

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

#Order #Crowns #Founders

Once you don't vote your ideals... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.
-- Ralph Nader

#Political #Democracy #Erode

Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.
-- Ralph Nader

#Sex #Dirty #Reality

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

#Sugar #Dentist

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

#Life #Years #Bulls

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

#Country #Political #Politics

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

#Congress #Consumers

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

#Technology #Data #People

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

#Consumers #Behalf

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

#America #Leader #Political

You should not allow yourself the luxuries of discouragement of despair. Bounce back immediately, and welcome the adversity because it produces harder thinking and harder drive to get to the objective.
-- Ralph Nader

#Adversity #Thinking #Luxury

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

#People #Watches #Growing

I enjoy my work so much that I have to be pulled away from my work into leisure.
-- Ralph Nader

#Commitment #Leisure #Enjoy

Water is the most precious, limited natural resource we have in this country...But because water belongs to no one - except the people - special interests, including government polluters, use it as their private sewers.
-- Ralph Nader

#Country #Government #Water

Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it.
-- Ralph Nader

#Socialism #Capitalism

President Reagan was elected on the promise of getting government off the backs of the people and now he demands that government wrap itself around the waists of the people.
-- Ralph Nader

#Hype #Government #People

She was the light of our lives, our anchor, compass and vision.
-- Ralph Nader

#Light #Anchors #Vision

As a public interest lawyer, your fund of injustice will never be empty.
-- Ralph Nader

#Injustice #Lawyer #Empty

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.
-- Ralph Nader

#Rights #Essence #Environmental

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity ...
-- Ralph Nader

#Expression #Humanity #Moral

Secrecy destroys accountability.
-- Ralph Nader

#Political #Accountability #Secrecy

The financial wealth of the top 1 percent of households in the U.S. exceeds the combined wealth of the bottom 95 percent.
-- Ralph Nader

#Financial #Wealth #Bottom

Companies like Enron have learned that small investments in endowing chairs, sponsoring research programs or hiring moonlighting professors can return big payoffs in generating books, reports, articles, testimony and other materials to push for and rationalize public policy positions that damage the public interest but benefit corporate bottomlines.
-- Ralph Nader

#Book #Research #Benefits

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

#Democracy #Turns #Turn-on

If they don't close these [nuclear] reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years.
-- Ralph Nader

#War #Years #Civil War

Information is the currency of democracy. It's denial must always be suspect.
-- Ralph Nader

#Democracy #Denial #Information

Every time I see something terrible, it's like I see it at age 19. I keep a freshness that way.
-- Ralph Nader

#Age #Way #Terrible

The common belief that coaches must be abusive to be successful is a myth. Research shows that if you find a task fun, you'll perform better. If more coaches took . . . a Golden Rule approach to coaching, treating their players the way they themselves would like to be treated, fewer athletes would drop out of sports in their teens, and more athletes at every level would be happier and more satisfied.
-- Ralph Nader

#Sports #Fun #Athlete

The concept of individual with a conscience is one whose highest allegiance is to his fellow man.
-- Ralph Nader

#Men #Individuality #Fellow Man

By the time you rise through the ranks, the culture of homogenization has bred the spirit and imagination out of you.
-- Ralph Nader

#Imagination #Balance #Culture

This (George W. Bush's) administration is not sympathetic to corporations, it is indentured to corporations
-- Ralph Nader

#Administration #Corporations #Sympathetic

The various Social Security privatization schemes, full and partial, would cost both the 'social' - that is the public, cooperative, societal - element of the program and 'security' - the rock-solid income guarantee afforded by the system. It should be rejected.
-- Ralph Nader

#Rocks #Income #Cost

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

#Jobs #Leader #Today

Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked
-- Ralph Nader

#Sanctions

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.
-- Ralph Nader

#Issues #Racism #Focus

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.
-- Ralph Nader

#War #Oil #United States

If you always vote for the lesser of two evils, you will always have evil, and you will always have less.
-- Ralph Nader

#Two #Evil #Vote

If you know what's going on and know how society can be improved and happiness advanced, you tend to focus on how to get things done that will help health, safety, opportunity, justice, accountability of powerful institutions to the people they are supposed to serve.
-- Ralph Nader

#Powerful #Responsibility #Opportunity

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.
-- Ralph Nader

#Organization #Today #Slavery