Quotes from Naomi Klein

In truth, nothing has done more to help build our present corporate dystopia than the persistent and systematic pitting of working-class whites against Blacks, citizens against migrants, and men against women. White supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia have been the elite's most potent defenses against genuine democracy.

Energy supply and environmental issues should not be left in the hands of private for-profit interests."14

losing one's job is much less frightening when getting it seemed an accident in the first place.

public infrastructure, economic planning, corporate regulation, international trade, consumption, and taxation

Looking ahead to coming disasters, ecological and political, we often assume that we are all going to face them together, that what's needed are leaders who recognize the destructive course we are on. But I'm not so sure. Perhaps part of the reason why so many of our elites, both political and corporate, are so sanguine about climate change is that they are confident they will be able to buy their way out of the worst of it.

The climate science will no longer be denied; what will be denied is the idea that the nations that are the largest historical emitters of carbon owe anything to the black and brown people impacted by that pollution. This will be denied based on the only rationale possible; that those non-white and non-Christian people are lesser than, are the other, are dangerous invaders.

This blitzkrieg strategy is actually quite high-risk. The danger of starting fights on so many fronts is that if it doesn't succeed in demoralizing your opponents, it could very well unite them.

We need to build a society around the understanding that well-being for all matters more than economic growth. Only then can we truly move away from climate0changing pollution and climate injustice.

ice sheets are melting faster than the models projected

Climate change is like that; it's hard to keep it in your head for very long.

The world does not have enough resources and energy to give everyone a life of consumer luxury. We could, though, improve everyone's uality of life in different ways.

When information about who is or is not a security threat is a product to be sold as readily as information about who buys Harry Potter books on Amazon or who has taken a Caribbean cruise and might enjoy one in Alaska, it changes the values of a culture. Not only does it create an incentive to spy, torture and generate false information but it creates a powerful impetus to perpetuate the fear and sense of peril that created the industry in the first place.

Authoritarian socialism and capitalism share strong tendencies toward centralizing (one in the hands of the state, the other in the hands of corporations). They also both keep their respective systems going through ruthless expansion—whether through production for production's sake, in the case of Soviet-era socialism, or consumption for consumption's sake, in the case of consumer capitalism.

Just as climate denialism has become core identity issue on the right, utterly entwined with defending current systems of power and wealth, the scientific reality of climate change must, for progressives, occupy a central place in a coherent narrative about the perils of unrestrained greed and the need for real alternatives.

It just so happens that we are all alive at the last possible moment when changing course can mean saving lives on a truly unimaginable scale.

You cannot advocate massive economic change in a country without that change having big political consequences.

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

The best thing about the Earth is if you poke holes in it oil and gas comes out." —Republican U.S. Congressman Steve Stockman, 20131

We have the best brand on earth: the Obama brand," she said. "Our possibilities are endless.

Many deniers are quite open about the fact that their distrust of the science grew out of a powerful fear that if climate change is real, the political implications would be catastrophic.

It is precisely because the dream of economic equality is so popular, and so difficult to defeat in a fair fight, that the shock doctrine was embraced in the first place.

Instead of helping people here, providing shelters here, bringing more generator power to the places that need them, getting the electric system up and running, they're encouraging people to leave instead.

Pieces of a living city cannot be auctioned off without taking into consideration that there are indigenous traditions, even if they seem odd to foreigners … . But these are our traditions and our city. For a long time we lived under the dictatorship of the Communists, but now we have found out that life under the dictatorship of business people is no better. They couldn't care less about what country they are in. —Grigory Gorin, Russian writer, 19931

Neoliberalism is an extreme form of capitalism that started to become dominant in the 1980s, under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, but since the 1990s has been the reigning ideology of the world's elites, regardless of partisan affiliation. Still, its strictest and most dogmatic adherents remain where the movement started: on the US right.