Quotes from Naomi Klein

The casual exclusion of tens of millions of people by free-market ideologues has reproduced frighteningly similar explosive conditions: proud populations that perceive themselves as humiliated by foreign forces, looking to regain their national pride by targeting the most vulnerable in their midst.

All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required. There are ways of preventing this

Much of U.S. foreign policy...is an exercise in projection, in which a tiny self-interested elite conflates its needs and desires with those of the entire world.

Not so long ago, disasters were periods of social levelling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together. Increasingly, however disasters are the opposite: they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival.

Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.

Iraq is the last great frontier in the Middle East … . In Iraq, 80 per cent of the oil wells ever drilled have been discoveries. —David Horgan, chief executive of the Irish oil company Petrel, January 20072

What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector—the workers—thereby drastically increasing the alliance's share of the national wealth.

If we rebuild our communities and begin to derive more meaning and a sense of the good life from them, many of us are going to be less susceptible to the siren song of mindless consumerism (and while we're at it, we might even spend less time producing and editing our personal brands on social media).

The very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet's climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.

it is not that "we" are broke or that we lack options. It is that our political class is utterly unwilling to go where the money is (unless it's for a campaign contribution), and the corporate class is dead set against paying its fair share.

Then again, this is The Nature Conservancy, which has its very own gas well in the middle of a nature preserve in Texas).52

As a brand, the Obama White House's identity is probably closest to Starbucks: hip, progressive, approachable —a small luxury you can feel good about even during tough economic times.

As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today's transformative movements can afford.

A destabilized climate is the cost of deregulated, global capitalism, its unintended, yet unavoidable consequence.39

The fences that protect the public interest seem to be fast disappearing, while the ones that restrict our liberties keep multiplying.

That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution—a problem it dealt with by changing the laws.

It's impossible to say how much the decision to use the tsunami as an opportunity for disaster capitalism contributed to the return to civil war.

Populations of songbirds like the pied flycatcher, meanwhile, are collapsing in some parts of Europe because the caterpillars that parents depend upon to feed their young are hatching too early.

Indeed the offset market has created a new class of green human rights abuses, wherein peasants and Indigenous people who venture into their traditional territories (reclassified as carbon sinks) in order to harvest plants, wood, or fish are harassed or worse...The added irony is that many people being sacrificed for the carbon market are living some of the most sustainable, low-carbon lifestyles on the planet.

As Upton Sinclair famously observed: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"36

From the perspective of a fossil fuel company, going after these high-risk carbon deposits is not a matter of choice—it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this year and last year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually guarantees that the planet will cook.

there is a direct and compelling relationship between the dominance of the values that are intimately tied to triumphant capitalism and the presence of anti-environment views and behaviors.

some of Gilead's key medicines were developed on grants funded by taxpayers.18 Gilead, for its part, sees epidemics as a growth market, and it has an aggressive marketing campaign to encourage businesses and individuals to stockpile Tamiflu, just in case.

The collusion between corporations and the state has been so boorishly defiant that it's almost as if the communities standing in the way of these projects are viewed as little more than overburden - that ugliest of words used by the extractive industries to describe the waste earth that must be removed to access tar sands or mineral deposit.