Ralph Nader quotes:

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.

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

Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.

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

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

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

This (George W. Bush's) administration is not sympathetic to corporations, it is indentured to corporations

Your best teacher is your last mistake.

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

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

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.

The civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.

Ford Motor Company's sluggish and piecemeal approach to its automotive responsibilities betrays motorists' safety.

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

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

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

The corporations don't like open courts of law, trials by jury. They want to privatize by pushing people into compulsory arbitration where they win most of the time and the whole process is pretty secret.

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

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

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

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

Arbitration is private. It doesn't have the tools to dig into the corporate files. It's usually controlled by arbitrators who want repeat business from corporations not from the injured person.

Nuclear power must be dealt with irrationally. . . . Nuclear plants are carcinogens. Let's get that story out. . . . Their lies will catch up to them. We need endless Chernobyl reminders.

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

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.

Companies like Enron have learned that small investments in endowing chairs, sponsoring research programs or hiring moonlighting professors can return big payoffs in generating books, reports, articles, testimony and other materials to push for and rationalize public policy positions that damage the public interest but benefit corporate bottomlines.

There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.

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

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.

People are interested in family traditions, and I think a lot of families can benefit from some of the ways that my parents dealt with the challenges of raising four kids.

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

Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.

I think Hillary Clinton is a militarist. She is a political coward. The interesting thing about Hilary Clinton, like Bill Clinton dodging the draft, he never touched the Pentagon - she is in the same position.

Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, 'legal' drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?

Nothing can stop the power of an informed citizenry when it is empowered, organized, and motivated.

If it is unpatriotic to tear down the flag, which is a symbol of the country, why isn't it more unpatriotic to desecrate the country itself-to pollute, despoil and ravage the air, land and sea.

It's not a cost of doing business when the corporation executives go to jail, and that's why they fight so hard to make sure the prosecutors' budget are very limited and that the campaign cash-greased lawmakers keep defending them against being held accountable.

If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.

The lesser of two evils, or the least of the worst, is not good enough for the American people anymore.

If you always vote for the lesser of two evils, you will always have evil, and you will always have less.

The 60th seed at Wimbledon gets a chance at Center Court. The 60th seed in the NCAA gets a chance to go to the Final Four. But the third seed [in presidential politics] is shut out.

The corporations have become our government. They're not just influential. Department by department, you name it, they put their people in high government positions, they have 10,000 PACs and 35,000 lobbyists, so there's no more opening to be heard.

We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.

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.

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

In this rigged, two-party system, third parties almost never win a national election. It's obvious what our function is in this constricted oligarchy of two corporate-indentured parties - to push hitherto taboo issues onto the public stage, to build for a future, to get a young generation in, keep the progressive agenda alive, push the two parties a little bit on this issue and that.

The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.

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

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

Looking at virtual reality through computer screens, video game screens, and above all television screens is a denial of personality development. It's a denial of socialization, of expansion of vocabulary, of interaction with real human beings.

Washington DC is corporate-occupied territory.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Power has to be insecure to be responsive.

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

[Jill Stein] don't have to engage in soundbites here as you may have experienced with some of the mass media.

[Jill Stein] want a global treaty to halt climate change that adds teeth and ends destructive energy extraction.

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

A wasteful defense is a weak defense.

All empires eventually destroy themselves. That's the record of history.

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

As I was saying, half a democracy is showing up and people have got not only to agree with this agenda, some of these third parties listeners, they've got to show up.

Both [Donald] Trump and Hillary [Clinton] want bigger military budgets and Hillary supports President Obama's one trillion dollar expenditure to so-called upgrade nuclear weapons. P

Business of blurring is fantastic. They both are playing the politics of avoidance. They avoid all the issues on corporate power, Iraq, Palestine, Israel, so on and so forth. They avoid all those. That's the politics of avoidance. All the major issues that are so much on people's minds - health care, living wage, public works, jobs - they avoid.

By the time you rise through the ranks, the culture of homogenization has bred the spirit and imagination out of you.

Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it.

Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism.

Congress is the great enabler, constitutionally, for progressive society, and it's the great graveyard, the way it's been behaving, against a prosperous society, or another billionaire or two.

Congress is the most powerful branch. It can expand a progressive society, or it can block a progressive society.

Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans

End perverse incentives that reward Wall Street speculators.

Ending police brutality and mass incarceration. There is a growing left-right support for criminal justice reform.

Everything will be solar in 30 years.

Families are incubators for citizen activists.

Family values stand up to injustice and power outside the household.

Fifteen dollars an hour minimum wage. That was one of the reasons why so many people flocked to Bernie Sanders candidacy.

For anybody here who's very worried about domestic priorities, just consider we have created, with this war on terrorism, more fighters, more countries embroiled. They're learning new weapons. They're learning new techniques. They're coming here in social media. The lone wolf thing is expanding. And once that blows here, then forget about domestic priorities.

For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.

Full Medicare-for-all, free choice of doctor and hospital: that comes in sixty to seventy percent without even further explanation. And if you ever explained it, given all the trouble people are having qualifying and not qualifying for all these healthcare so-called insurance plans, it would go up even higher.

Gates's net wealth is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40% of Americans (112,000,000 people).

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

Hillary Clinton is going to find common ground with the Republicans on foreign and military affairs. They both want to enhance the military budget.

Hillary Clinton's never seen a weapons system or a war she hasn't liked.

Hillary Clinton's ready to pick a fight with Putin. So are the Republicans.

Hillary Clinton's ready to pivot to Asia and provoke China. So are the Republicans. It's on domestic issues that there will be a gridlock.

I can say that you [Jill Sander] are my successor on the Green Party ticket so I know a little bit about what you're going through and I'm sure listeners are eager to hear you out.

I don't like too much by-standing, on-looking, and spectator-behavior in people's lives.

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

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.

I hear people who are worried about climate change tell me, oh, Congress that's gridlock, that's not where the action is.

I suppose the Green Party doesn't care for the anti-civil libertarian provisions of the notoriously named Patriot Act, invading privacy, and being able to search your home, and not tell you for 72 hours.

I think George W. Bush's personality was overwhelmingly shaped in negative ways by his upbringing.

I think most Americans are against illegal surveillance of their emails and telephone calls by the government.

I think most Americans are ready for waging peace and not just brutalizing our foreign policy which is boomeranging against us.

I think most people would like that: probably comes in about ninety percent. They see their public works crumbling, services inadequate, they have libraries and schools and bridges and highways that have not been repaired.

I think we should make a closer link between domestic policy and an interventionist militaristic foreign policy.

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

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

If you know what's going on and know how society can be improved and happiness advanced, you tend to focus on how to get things done that will help health, safety, opportunity, justice, accountability of powerful institutions to the people they are supposed to serve.

If you're kept off the debates, you can't reach more two percent of people even if you campaign every state and fill the big conventions like Madison Square Garden.

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

If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, we'd be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today.

In 2000 the majority of people wanted me and Buchanan on the debates in two thousand. And me on the debates in 2004. have there been any polls?

In 2004 Professor Stephen Farnsworth, when I report saying that I got about five minutes on all the networks after Labor Day to election day: only five minutes even though I, like you, were representing majoritarian issues.

In the meantime the big corporations are fleeing America for tax havens and places like Ireland, Luxembourg and the Grand Cayman Islands; the rich are finding more tax loopholes to expect; so when are the people going to basically roll up their sleeves and say, we've had enough, we're going to recapture Congress.

Information is the currency of democracy. It's denial must always be suspect.

Is there a number or mark planned for the hand or forehead in a new cashless society? YES, and I have seen the machines that are now ready to put it into operation.

It is basically a strategy to destroy the essence of democracy, which is the competitiveness and choices of candidates on the ballot.

It was an injured worker finding a lawyer on a contingent fee in a little town in Texas that blew the top off one of the greatest industrial disasters in American history.

It's all these pundits, all these consultants, and the candidates, as if they're in a bubble leaving democracy off-limits.

Jill Stein, is - and I'll make it in a personal way - over eighty percent of the people when I ran for President knew about me but then I realized that when I was running, eighty percent of the people didn't even know I was running.

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.

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.

Let's look at the Trump and Bernie Sanders insurgencies. They were basically insurgencies against the Republican and Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders made no mistake about it. And, of course, Trump didn't either. And they almost won.