Ralph Nader Quotations

I once said to my father, when I was a boy, 'Dad we need a third political party.' He said to me, 'I'll settle for a second.'

The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.

For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.

John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.

No presidential candidate should visit Las Vegas without condemning organized gambling.

Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust.

The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That's the only difference.

A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.

When strangers start acting like neighbors... communities are reinvigorated.

The 'democracy gap' in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the 'least worst' every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the 'least worst' gets worse.

I start with the premise that the function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.

Once you don't vote your ideals... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.

President Reagan was elected on the promise of getting government off the backs of the people and now he demands that government wrap itself around the waists of the people.

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

People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

Turn on to politics, or politics will turn on you.

If God hadn't meant for us to eat sugar, he wouldn't have invented dentists.

This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies.

The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.

I don't think meals have any business being deductible. I'm for separation of calories and corporations.

The shortcomings of America's political leaders do not stop at our borders.

Every time I see something terrible, it's like I see it at age 19. I keep a freshness that way.

It is fascinating to watch legislators turn away from their usual corporate grips when they hear the growing thunder of the people.

Like sex in Victorian England, the reality of Big Business today is our big dirty secret.

Our founders did not oust George III in order for us to crown Richard I.

Let's not just look at it as taking votes away from Gore. Our support comes from a lot of people.

Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked

The networks are not some chicken-coop manufacturing lobby whose calls nobody returns.

The liberal intelligentsia has allowed its party to become a captive of corporate interests.

The nation is faced with one of the most corporate-orientated anti-consumer Congresses in our history.

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

We're going to prove them wrong in November,

We grow up corporate, not civic. For example, we were led to believe that most crime comes from the street.

should be stripped of their non-profit status, and television networks who work with them should realize they are working with a political organization, not an educational organization.

Sixty-four percent of people polled want a four-way debate. People like debate. They like competition. They like not to fall asleep in front of the TV set, watching the drab debate the dreary.

Of course not, no. Less chance than John Kerry and George W. Bush dropping out.

Only Al Gore can beat Al Gore, ... it won't matter who wins.

Neither party can afford to stand tall for the American people and oppose the takeover of our political government by big business,

People want positive politics demonstrating changes and reforms instead of the politics of personality and personal acrimony enveloped in sterile media forays about the tactics of the day.

If Al Gore does not change the spectrum of his agenda and broaden it out, he is going to lose California,

Stadiums rise with tax dollars; schools and clinics crumble, in the same city. Grotesque!

Microsoft doesn't respect the antitrust laws, and it has amply demonstrated that it can't be trusted. The company has shown its contempt for any court-imposed changes in its conduct. If the government ends the antitrust case by seeking changes in its conduct, but not in its structure, Microsoft can be expected to creatively evade the thrust of such agreements.

You can have a lot more leverage in this country in another way, and that is by determining the margin of victory between Democrats and Republicans. It's not a spoiler role, it's a leverage role.

There is, as well, a consumer issue at stake here. Fans have purchased tickets for Eagles' games, in Philadelphia and elsewhere, on the assumption that they will see one of the game's most exciting receivers, so long as he is healthy enough to play. The Eagles' action denies them this opportunity.

Why do you have to stimulate the economy when there's huge unused capacity, when there's plenty of capital around, and when interest rates are at historic lows?

To shut out legitimate third-party candidates from these debates is to limit the competitive democratic process on which the American electoral system is supposed to be built,

dishonors this country's traditional respect for free speech.

These were not conscientious objectors. They were belligerent draft dodgers,

I've always been independent, it's a thing with me, ... I don't want to get involved in these internal Green Party disputes, that's for them to settle ... I want to extravert the party's agenda.

of increasing the number of presidential debates and including more voices in those debates.

A 'no' vote will potentially save taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars.

This country is run by a war criminal and his vice president, an even bigger war criminal.

This is a medical malpractice crisis. Over 80,000 Americans, 220 every day, die from medical negligence. Hundreds of thousands are injured.

They're going to have to reach out or they're going to lose votes.

There's a tremendous bias in state laws against third parties and independent candidates, bred by the two major parties, who passed these laws. They don't like competition. So it's like climbing a cliff with a slippery rope, ... Meet the Press.

Not a single candidate who I am aware of ever looks at the American people and says to them, 'Do you want to be more powerful against the rich and powerful? That's why this campaign is so different.

But you've heard him speak about Saddam. For every question we put to the president about domestic needs he has one answer: attack Iraq, attack Iraq, attack Iraq. Psychologists would call this the obsessive-compulsive syndrome.

I don't want to exaggerate it, so I'll just say massively more.

Gore and Bush couldn't say no to that.

A citizenship of wholesale delegation and abdication to public and private power systems, such as prevails now, makes such periodic checks as elections little more than rituals.

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

The central challenge for any company, regardless of its size, is to keep doing a better job for its customers.

End perverse incentives that reward Wall Street speculators.

Obama & McCain differ, but neither takes on corporations.

Washington DC is corporate-occupied territory.

When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.

We should tax things we don't like. We should tax pollution ... And we should lighten the taxes on things we do like, like honest labor, like food.

[As a child] I was very interested in books that detailed injustice and how people who are underdogs were mistreated throughout history.

The only true aging is the erosion of one's ideals.

I have a consistent rule: The American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does.

The flow from knowledge to action draws upon the complete person with his or her catalyst and synergistic potential.

General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it.

Things have gotten so bad in this country, you look back at Richard Nixon with nostalgia.

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

Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans

The food industry, its trade associations, and research foundations, is well financed and highly organized to pressure the FDA.

To top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole.

The accountability of government has gone to the point where the very use of the law is the instrument of illegality.

George W. Bush is very vulnerable but not if you campaign the way the major candidates - except for Dean and Kucinich - are campaigning.

There's only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He's half African-American. Whether that will make any difference, I don't know. I haven't heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What's keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We'll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards.

When people ask, 'Why should the rich pay a larger percent of their income than middle-income people?' My answer is not an answer most people get: It's because their power developed from laws that enriched them.

We don't measure whether an economy is developing. We just measure whether companies are selling more, whether inventories are up or down, not whether the health, safety and economic well-being of people are being advanced.

We are practicing what we preach so that we may preach what we practice.

Obviously, the answer to oil spills is to paper-train the tankers.

This country has been strip-mined by rich and powerful interests. If you dont like what they're doing, don't just sit there. Vote them out.

The common belief that coaches must be abusive to be successful is a myth. Research shows that if you find a task fun, you'll perform better. If more coaches took . . . a Golden Rule approach to coaching, treating their players the way they themselves would like to be treated, fewer athletes would drop out of sports in their teens, and more athletes at every level would be happier and more satisfied.

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

If they don't close these [nuclear] reactors down, we'll have civil war in five years.

The various Social Security privatization schemes, full and partial, would cost both the 'social' - that is the public, cooperative, societal - element of the program and 'security' - the rock-solid income guarantee afforded by the system. It should be rejected.

The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders.

We have the most prolonged adolescence in the history of mankind. There is no other society that requires so many years to pass before people are grown up ... Adolescence is nurtured and prolonged by educational processes and by industry that has found a bonanza in embracing the adolescent population and fortifying 'adolescent values.' This prolongation of adolescence robs the country of the population group having the most risk takers, and the highest ideals.

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.

Secrecy destroys accountability.

I enjoy my work so much that I have to be pulled away from my work into leisure.

She was the light of our lives, our anchor, compass and vision.

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

Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity ...

Whatever your issue is, whether it's racism or homophobia or policy issues or taxes or urban decay or health care, you're not going to go anywhere with it if we don't focus on the concentration of power.