Quotes from 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.

I really did have this powerful sense, when I was in New Orleans after the storm, of watching all these profiteers descend on Baton Rouge to lobby to get rid of the housing projects and privatise the school system - I thought I was in some science-fiction experiment.

For someone with a background of economic justice, what scared me about climate change is not just that the sea level will rise and we'll have more storms - it's how this intersects with that cocktail of inequality and racism.

My sister lives in Oklahoma. And, you know, it is so shocking that James Inhofe, the foremost climate-denying senator, is from the state that is so deeply climate-affected.

A large-scale crisis - whether a terrorist attack or a financial crash - would likely provide the pretext to declare some sort of state of exception or emergency, where the usual rules no longer apply.

As soon as you write about climate change, the first attempt to discredit you is, 'Well, you wrote this on a computer,' or, 'You took a plane to this conference.' So your opinion isn't valid.

The electoral strategy for 2016 was, 'Vote for me; I'm not Trump,' and, 'Trump is dangerous, so get out and vote.'

If there is one thing BP's 'watery improv act' made clear, it is that, as a culture, we have become far too willing to gamble with things that are precious and irreplaceable, and to do so without a back-up plan, without an exit strategy.

I can tell you Donald Trump's products may not be made in America, but Donald Trump was made in America.

The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.

Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.

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.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.

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.

Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, 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 in 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.

The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.

Because, underneath all of this is the real truth we have been avoiding: climate change isn't an "issue" to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message—spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions—telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet. Telling us that we need to evolve.

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.

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.

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.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

Slavery wasn't a crisis for British and American elites until abolitionism turned it into one. Racial discrimination wasn't a crisis until the civil rights movement turned it into one. Sex discrimination wasn't a crisis until feminism turned it into one. Apartheid wasn't a crisis until the anti-apartheid movement turned it into one.