Quotes from Naomi Klein

It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.

the authors of the CIA manual, that effective torture was not sadism but science. "The precise pain in the precise place, in the precise amount" was his motto.

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.

Trump didn't just enter politics as a so-called outsider, somebody who doesn't play by the rules. He entered politics playing by a completely different set of rules—the rules of branding. According to those rules, you don't need to be objectively good or decent; you only need to be true and consistent to the brand you have created

Countries, like people, don't reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. Major cities will very likely drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and there is a very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts. And we don't have to do anything to bring about this future.

It is a painful irony that while the right is forever casting climate change as a left-wing plot, most leftists and liberals are still averting their eyes, having yet to grasp that climate science has handed them the most powerful argument against unfettered capitalism since William Blake's "dark Satanic Mills" blackened England's skies (which, incidentally, was the beginning of climate change).

Competitive branding became a necessity of the machine age — within a context of manufactured sameness; image-based difference had to be manufactured along with the product.

During disasters, you hear a lot of praise for human resilience. And we are a remarkably resilient species. But that's not always good. It seems a great many of us can get used to almost anything, even the steady annihilation of our own habitat.

With every alleged ethics violation, with every brazen lie, with every deranged tweet, this administration leaves the public sphere more broken and degraded. Even if corruption (or treason) ultimately costs Trump the White House, what will be left behind will be wreckage—proof of the fundamental premise of Trump's political project: that government is not just a swamp, it's a burden. That there is nothing worth protecting. That private is better than public.

Stop calling me resilient. I'm not resilient. Because every time you say, 'Oh, they're resilient,' you can do something else to me." –Tracie Washington, New Orleans-based civil rights attorney, 2010

In New Orleans after Katrina, some of the key players who now surround Trump showed to what lengths they will go to decimate the public sphere and advance the interests of real estate developers, private contractors, and oil companies.

Creative destruction is our middle name, both within our own society and abroad. We tear down the old order every day, from business to science, literature, art, architecture, and cinema to politics and the law … . They must attack us in order to survive, just as we must destroy them to advance our historic mission. —Michael Ledeen, The War Against the Terror Masters, 2002

Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing "climate-ready" crops—seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta.

The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies remain some of the most profitable corporations in history...These companies are rich, quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto regular people around the world.

The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are actually a hero—creating jobs and fueling growth. Don't be nice, be a killer.

Any attempt to hold ideologies accountable for the crimes committed by their followers must be approached with a great deal of caution. It's too easy to assert that those with whom we disagree are not just wrong but tyrannical, fascist, genocidal.

their lands as a result of our actions (and inactions), our governments will build ever more high-tech fortresses and adopt even more draconian anti-immigration laws. And, in the name of

During normal, nonemergency times, the capacity of the human mind to rationalize, to compartmentalize, and to be distracted easily is an important coping mechanism. (...) When it comes to rising to the reality of climate breakdown, however, these traits are proving to be our collective undoing. They are reassuring us when we should not be reassured. They are distracting us when we should not be distracted. And they are easing our consciences when our consciences should not be eased.

Simone de Beauvoir, writing on the same subject, concurred: "To protest in the name of morality against 'excesses' or 'abuses' is an error which hints at active complicity. There are no 'abuses' or 'excesses' here, simply an all-pervasive system."24

Deep emission cuts in the wealthy nations have to start immediately.

We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.

In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neo liberalism is frequently spoken of as the second colonial pillage: in the first pillage, the riches were seized from the land, and in the second they were stripped from the state.

If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though. The relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is trivial by comparison.