Best 184 quotes of Ralph Nader on MyQuotes

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

Everything will be solar in 30 years.

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

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

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.

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

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 always say there's no ticket of admission for active citizenship. Anybody can get through that gate, and anybody can ask that basic question that gets the ball rolling.

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

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

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.

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

I finally came to Washington. That's when something happened. The Motor Vehicle Act of 1966, even though it was irregularly enforced - sometimes very little under Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan - it saved over 200,000 lives, millions of injuries prevented or reduced in severity.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.