Katherine Klem Quotations

I have never felt God more in my five years of fighting the tobacco industry than in this experience. I absolutely couldn't believe it. We both actually found the business cards our parents had exchanged and we both carry it in our wallets as good luck charms.

Ignite just held our first annual National Day of Action, on which, for the first time, students all across the country simultaneously pressured politicians to stop looking the other way.

Ignite is definitely still in humble beginnings. We are completely student-led, and we're all volunteers. Because we work after class, out of our homes or dorm rooms, it can sometimes be hard to move as fast as we want.

It dawned on me that we didn't have any national meeting, much less an organization, for youth that were fighting the tobacco industry.

Tobacco companies wouldn't spend $4.2 million per day marketing in the U.S. if advertisements didn't change the way people viewed their product.

And there, in that kitchen, I became determined to start Ignite.

This is why this fight is really a social justice issue for me. In the end, millions of people are addicted to killing themselves and multinational corporations are profiting from it.

Eventually, this may mean we actually get college students to run for state and local office. There have definitely been instances of college students being elected to public office before. And, to my knowledge, they didn't have one capstone social justice issue like this to run on.

It just so happened that I was going to be her advisor for the Presidential Scholars program that summer.

I had this pile of documents that exposed how this industry was trying to hook people to killing themselves and to make a profit, and then I was seeing this incredibly tangible way to fight back and prevent the tobacco industry from leading people to their deaths.

Honestly, I was so amazed -- they were doing far more powerful things than we were doing in Kentucky. How could we not pull all these groups together and fight with one voice?