Quotes by Naomi Klein

“We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because were not getting those things from our communities or from each other.”

“Terrorism doesnt just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism - real and exaggerated - has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.”

“When Nike says, just do it, thats a message of empowerment. Why arent the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?”

“Politics hates a vacuum. If it isnt filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.”

“The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity.”

“Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.”

“Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich”

“Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material,”

“Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material.”

Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.

You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality -- not at the same time as youre bombing people, you cant.

Either greed belongs in a war zone, or it doesnt. You cant unleash it in the name of sparking an economic boom and then be shocked when Halliburton overcharges for everything from towels to gas, when Parsons sub, sub, sub-contractor builds a police academy where the pipes drip raw sewage on the heads of army cadets and where Blackwater investigates itself and finds it acted honorably. Thats just corporations doing what they do and Iraq is a privatized war zone so thats what you get. Build a frontier, you get cowboys and robber barons.

The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.

Reconciliation means that those who have been on the underside of history must see that there is a qualitative difference between repression and freedom. And for them, freedom translates into having a supply of clean water, having electricity on tap; being able to live in a decent home and have a good job; to be able to send your children to school and to have accessible health care. I mean, whats the point of having made this transition if the quality of life of these people is not enhanced and improved? If not, the vote is useless.-archbishop Desmond Tutu, chair of South Africas Truth and Reconciliation Committee, 2001

Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.

Fundamentally, the task is to articulate not just an alternative set of policy proposals but an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis - embedded in interdependence rather than hyper-individualism, reciprocity rather than dominance, and cooperation rather than hierarchy. This is required not only to create a political context to dramatically lower emissions, but also to help us cope with the disasters we can no longer avoid. Because in the hot and stormy future we have already made inevitable through our past emissions, an unshakable belief in the equal rights of all people and a capacity for deep compassion will be the only things standing between civilization and barbarism.

The author and intellectual Cornel West has said that justice is what love looks like in public. I often think that neoliberalism is what lovelessness looks like as policy.

Culture jamming is enjoying a resurgence, in part because of technological advancements but also more pertinently, because of the good old rules of supply and demand. Something not far from the surfaces of the public psyche is delighted to see the icons of corporate power subverted and mocked. There is, in short, a market for it. With commercialism able to overpower the traditional authority of religion, politics and schools, corporations have emerged a the natural targets for all sorts of free-floating rage and rebellion. The new ethos that culture jamming taps into is go-for-the-corporate-jugular.

[O]urs is a culture of the perpetual present, one that deliberately severs itself from the past that created us as well as the future we are shaping with our actions.

By posing climate change as a battle between capitalism and the planet, I am not saying anything that we dont already know. the battle is already under way, but right now capitalism is winning hands down. it wins every time the need for economic growth is used as the excuse for putting off climate action yet again, of for breaking emission reduction commitments already made. it wins when Greeks are told that their only path out of economic crises is to open up their beautiful seas to high-risk oil and gas drilling. it wins when Canadians are told our only hope of not ending unlike Greece is to allow our boreal forests to be flayed so we can access the semisolid bitumen from the Alberta tar sands . it wins when a park in Istanbul is slotted for demolition to make way for yet another shopping mall. it wins when parents in Beijing are told that sending their wheezing kids to school in pollution masks decorated to look like cute cartoon characters is an acceptable price for economic progress. it wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.