Quotes from Ralph Nader

A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses…in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

You should not allow yourself the luxuries of discouragement of despair. Bounce back immediately, and welcome the adversity because it produces harder thinking and harder drive to get to the objective.

How often do police accidentally shoot and kill bankers who are committing financial crimes, stealing homes, and plunging the nation into economic instability and recession?

The Function of Leadership is to produce more Leaders, Not more Followers.

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity ...

Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn't even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.

A society with more justice needs less charity.

As a public interest lawyer, your fund of injustice will never be empty.

It is a disturbing sign of the times when the two most transformative science technologies affecting the globe—biotechnology and nanotechnology—are governed by no external ethical or legal frameworks to protect public safety and other public interests, despite the fact that both industries have benefited from heavy taxpayer-funded government support.

Members of Congress are like the voters in one respect -- they want to go with the winners.

If the people are the landlords of the public airwaves and the television and radio stations are the tenants, why don't the tenants pay rent?

The World Health Organization has named antibiotic resistance as one of the three major health problems of the new century.

Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value

Our public lands contain a wealth of natural resources—trees, oil, gas, coal, gold, silver, copper, iron, zinc, and many other minerals, onshore and off. We own these lands. Yet under current law the corporations control their extraction and pay very little to Uncle Sam for what revenues and profits they reap. Sometimes, in fact, they pay just about nothing.

A great problem of contemporary life is how to control the power of economic interests which ignore the harmful effects of their applied science and technology.

What frequently begins as a conspiracy frequently develops into conditioned response, with only occasional explicit coordination required.

The concept of individual with a conscience is one whose highest allegiance is to his fellow man.

Justice needs money; it always has . . . whether for abolition of slavery and early women's rights movements or the civil rights and environmental drives of our generation.

If you don't turn on to politics, politics will turn on you.

If you're not turned on by politics, politics will turn on you.

The clinical definition of "fascism" is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.