Ralph Nader 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

We must strive to become good ancestors.

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

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

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

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

In this rigged, two-party system, third parties almost never win a national election. It's obvious what our function is in this constricted oligarchy of two corporate-indentured parties - to push hitherto taboo issues onto the public stage, to build for a future, to get a young generation in, keep the progressive agenda alive, push the two parties a little bit on this issue and that.

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.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

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?

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

Arbitration is private. It doesn't have the tools to dig into the corporate files. It's usually controlled by arbitrators who want repeat business from corporations not from the injured person.

Looking at virtual reality through computer screens, video game screens, and above all television screens is a denial of personality development. It's a denial of socialization, of expansion of vocabulary, of interaction with real human beings.

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

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

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

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.

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.

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.

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

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity.

Nuclear power must be dealt with irrationally. . . . Nuclear plants are carcinogens. Let's get that story out. . . . Their lies will catch up to them. We need endless Chernobyl reminders.

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

I think Hillary Clinton is a militarist. She is a political coward. The interesting thing about Hilary Clinton, like Bill Clinton dodging the draft, he never touched the Pentagon - she is in the same position.

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.

The reason that democracies always defeat dictatorships is because they're open to debate. We should never allow Washington to say, 'Shut up, get in line and wave the flag.'

The corporations have become our government. They're not just influential. Department by department, you name it, they put their people in high government positions, they have 10,000 PACs and 35,000 lobbyists, so there's no more opening to be heard.

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

Ending police brutality and mass incarceration. There is a growing left-right support for criminal justice reform.

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

We live in a two-party tyranny that doesn't believe in competition, can enforce it with penalties and obstructions, and they're getting closer and closer to being both one corporate party with two heads having different labels.

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.

In the meantime the big corporations are fleeing America for tax havens and places like Ireland, Luxembourg and the Grand Cayman Islands; the rich are finding more tax loopholes to expect; so when are the people going to basically roll up their sleeves and say, we've had enough, we're going to recapture Congress.

The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.

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.

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.

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

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.

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

The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible.

The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals.

We have a Democratic Party that cannot defend the American people from the worst Republican Party in history because it's a Democratic Party of war and Wall Street.

The threats are coming to this country, which will, of course, increase the massive industry known as the anti-terrorism industry, and crush our civil liberties and civil rights, And it's devouring our priorities here in communities all over the country which are in such disrepair and are so neglected in terms of public works and public services.