Naomi A. Klein is a Canadian author, social activist, and filmmaker known for her political analyses and criticism of corporate globalization and of capitalism. On a three-year appointment from September 2018, she is the Gloria Steinem Chair in Media, Culture, and Feminist Studies at Rutgers University. This Naomi Klein quotes will motivate you.
Best Naomi Klein Quotes
- “Our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction of humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature” ~ Naomi Klein
- “The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away, in which the inherent value of people and all life is foundational.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “We can’t leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don’t regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“[On climate change:] What if it’s all a hoax and we’ve created a better world for nothing?” ~ Naomi Klein
- “The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “We live in this culture of endless extraction and disposal: extraction from the earth, extraction from people’s bodies, from communities, as if there’s no limit, as if there’s no consequence to how we’re taking and disposing, and as if it can go on endlessly. We are reaching the breaking point on multiple levels. Communities are breaking, the planet is breaking, people’s bodies are breaking. We are taking too much.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality — not at the same time as you’re bombing people, you can’t.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “It seems to me that our problem has a lot less to do with the mechanics of solar power than the politics of human power—specifically whether there can be a shift in who wields it, a shift away from corporations and toward communities, which in turn depends on whether or not the great many people who are getting a rotten deal under our current system can build a determined and diverse enough social force to change the balance of power.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time—whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “When Nike says, just do it, that’s a message of empowerment. Why aren’t the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“Anybody who claims that they know where this whole thing is all going is just lying.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “The creation of today’s market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “I do think that at this moment in late capitalism it is easier in our minds to imagine raising Florida 30 feet to escape the rising seas than it is to regulate capitalism to make it serve human beings.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesn’t. You can’t unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons’ sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. That’s just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so that’s what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Our problem is that the climate crisis hatched in our laps at a moment in history when political and social conditions were uniquely hostile to a problem of this nature and magnitude-that moment being the tail end of the go-go ’80s, the blastoff point for the crusade to spread deregulated capitalism around the world. Climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished. Yet it entered mainstream consciousness in the midst of an ideological war being waged on the very idea of the collective sphere.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“People without memory are putty.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “The deeper message that is resonating with people is that it is possible to build. It is possible to invest in people; it is possible to invest in green infrastructure; it’s possible to change.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “If enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “The reason why nothing sticks to Trump – or very little sticks to Trump – is that Trump created his brand idea that has to do with being the guy who gets away from it. It’s this ultimate power through wealth and this dream that represents in an age of tremendous economic precariousness and constrained options for so many people – that watching Trump be able to do whatever he wants to whoever he wants is this obvious vicarious kind of thrill for a certain demographic.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi’s and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“The anti-war movement should turn itself into a pro-democracy movement” ~ Naomi Klein
- “It’s CNN who really should hold Trump accountable. And because they are trading the short-term fix of increased ratings by focusing on Trump drama – and I’m not saying they shouldn’t cover the Russian investigations, of course they should – but the blanket coverage, it’s not about news values. It is about ratings. And it comes at a tremendous cost because Trump supporters are fully defended against this. As far as they’re concerned, this is a vast conspiracy, it’s fake news, it doesn’t impact their daily lives, it makes them see Trump as a victim, which he wants to be seen as.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn’t show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “It (the Chinese move to embrace capitalism in 1989) is a mirror of the corporatist state first pioneered in Chile under Pinochet: a revolving door between corporate and political elites who combine their power to eliminate workers as an organized political force. The creation of today’s market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy, but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It’s easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“Real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “And if there is one thing we can be sure of, it’s that extreme weather events like Superstorm Sandy, Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, and the British floods—disasters that, combined, pummeled coastlines beyond recognition, ravaged millions of homes, and killed many thousands—are going to keep coming.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “I think there is a danger that an environmental crisis can be used in precisely the same way as the terrorist threat can be used in terms of giving up freedom.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Indeed the three policy pillars of the neoliberal age-privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and the lowering of income and corporate taxes, paid for with cuts to public spending-are each incompatible with many of the actions we must take to bring our emissions to safe levels.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Most of you didn’t think that helping people share books would be a subversive act…Yet the fact is that you have chosen a profession that has become radical.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“Like Russia’s gangsterism and Bush’s cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “This same economic system, based on short-term growth and endless profits is also the reason for pretty much everything else that is lousy in our society, from private prisons to Fox News. What I’m arguing is that, in fact, what we’ve been told is a lie.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Ever since Steve Bannon was demoted, and drama started playing out between Bannon and Jared Kushner and the firing of Comey and “Is he going to get impeached?” we have been trapped in a classic Survivor reality TV show, like, “Who’s going to get voted off the island?” And this has every single news show enjoying ratings never seen before. And it physically pains them to talk about the stakes of this administration, whether it’s health care or climate change or the deregulation of the financial sector or social security. None of it can compete with this reality show.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “The widespread abuse of prisoners is a virtually foolproof indication that politicians are trying to impose a system–whether political, religious or economic–that is rejected by large numbers of the people they are ruling. Just as ecologists define ecosystems by the presence of certain “indicator species” of plants and birds, torture is an indicator species of a regime that is engaged in a deeply anti-democratic project, even if that regime happens to have come to power through elections.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “We have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism. … We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe – and would benefit the vast majority – are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“My favorite sign here says, “I care about you.” In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say, “Let them die,” that is a deeply radical statement.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “It doesn’t have the ability to think rationally this economic model. It thinks like a drug addict: ‘Where can I get my next fix?’ It doesn’t learn wisely. Any kind of measure of natural wisdom would be: you make a mistake, you correct it the next time around. But a drug addict feels terrible… and then says: ‘I want more’. Unfortunately, we have an economic model that thinks like a crack addict.” ~ Naomi Klein quotes
- “That is the meaning of the Trump brand – being the boss who is so rich and so powerful he can do whatever he wants. So the way in which he ran for president was to embody that idea as fully as he possibly could with his outrageousness. I don’t think he actually thought he would win. I think the original idea was purely a marketing idea. It seemed a no-lose situation, because he would get so much free publicity. And this has always been his genius – I shouldn’t use the word “genius” when talking about Trump – but he’s always understood the value of free publicity.” ~ Naomi Klein
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“If you’re not arguing, your coalition isn’t wide enough.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “There are lots of incredible people who are working in very flawed structures that are designed to keep us apart, so we’re going to have to figure this out. The first stage is just talking about it openly: We are all working within structures where there is a disincentive to do what we most need to do, which is come together. I don’t know what the answer is but I definitely think that that first stage is just being honest about it and trying to speak about it in a way that is not just accusatory.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Trump walked into a media setting for which he was far better suited than the other contenders because he actually knows how to do reality TV and made them all look like pretenders. And I would argue that our news media has only gotten worse since Trump got in office. Trump is media crack. The ratings have never been higher. The reason CNN would run an hour of an empty podium waiting for him to show up during the campaign is because they were terrified if they turned away from Trump their rating would go down.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material,.” ~ Naomi Klein
- “I’m not talking about Trump’s brand but rather the intimately connected brand called “make America great again” that he created to make all these promises to working Americans – is intensely vulnerable, if there is sustained scrutiny of the kind we’ve seen about Comey and Russia. He’s appointed five Goldman Sachs former executives to his Cabinet, his commerce secretary is renegotiating NAFTA to make it far better for corporations and worse for workers, and they’re talking about this right out in the open… I mean, how much news have you seen about that?” ~ Naomi Klein
