Top 66 Naomi Klein Quotes

As soon as it was clear, in Copenhagen in 2009, that the Senate was blocking Obama from introducing meaningful climate legislation, the push was for him to use executive authority, use the EPA, use the tool of federal leases, and there was just a refusal to do it.

This is what he has been selling on the ‘The Apprentice’, through his self-help books, how to – you know, ‘Trump 101’ or the ‘Art of the Deal’ or, really, back to ‘Art of the Deal’. So almost the more he gets away with, the more he is reinforcing his brand.

The divestment movement is a start at challenging the excesses of capitalism. It’s working to delegitimize fossil fuels and showing that they’re just as unethical as profits from the tobacco industry.

One shouldn’t gamble with what is irreplaceable and precious.

One of the ideas that I wanted to highlight, which is actually a very bipartisan idea – it’s not just about conservatives – is this worship of wealth, the CEO saviour.

When I feel my blood sugar getting off, I drink a glass of kale juice. It’s so disgusting you don’t want to eat anything!

I was having a lot of people ask me to update ‘The Shock Doctrine’ and add a chapter about Trump.

What you want to do is you want to own as little sort of hard infrastructure as possible, and your real value is your name and how you build that up.

It takes me a long time writing books. It takes me about five years to write a book, and when I’m done, the last thing I want to do is to do it again.

My father was born in Newark, New Jersey, and my mother was born in Philadelphia. They both went to Stanford for grad school and met there.

The Heartland Institute, which people mostly only know in terms of the fact that it hosts these annual conferences of climate change skeptics or deniers, it’s important to know that the Heartland Institute is first and foremost a free market think tank. It’s not a scientific organization.

When I went to Australia, I had this feeling, like, ‘Wow, this is really a different country.’ I think that feeling of genuine foreignness, that this is a very different culture, which is increasingly rare in our globalised world.

My worry about this exclusive focus on Trump – the personality and how all of this is so unprecedented – is that then the solution seems to be, ‘Well, we’ll just get rid of Trump.’

That is the core of Trump. He is undoubtedly an idiot, but do not underestimate how good he is at that.

After the Pearl Harbor attacks, around 120,000 Japanese Americans were jailed in internment camps. If an attack on U.S. soil were perpetrated by people who were not white and Christian, we can be pretty damn sure that racists would have a field day.

The problem with Donald Trump is that he went and designed a brand that is entirely amoral.

I think the fossil fuel industry is genuinely freaked out by the combination of the price collapse, the divestment movement, and that fact that renewable energy is getting so cheap so fast.

As I was writing ‘The Shock Doctrine’, I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina.

That’s the trick of free market economic theory: it doesn’t just ask you to only be selfish and not care about others. It tells you that by being selfish, you are helping others. And, in fact, by trying to directly help others, you will hurt them.

In terms of Hurricane Sandy, I really do see some hopeful grassroots responses, particularly in the Rockaways, where people were very organized right from the beginning, where Occupy Sandy was very strong, where new networks emerged.

That is the meaning of the Trump brand – being the boss who is so rich and so powerful he can do whatever he wants. So the way in which he ran for president was to embody that idea as fully as he possibly could with his outrageousness.

I had maybe watched ‘The Apprentice’ a couple of times. I didn’t know that in later seasons they deported half of their contestants into tents in the backyard. They called it Trump’s trailer park.

In a marketplace where it’s so easy to produce products, where your competitors can essentially match you on the product itself, you need to have something else. You need to have an added value, and that added value is the identity, the idea behind your brand.

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

The way in which people talk about climate is just so wonky and so abstract and such a boys’ club that it makes a lot of women just roll their eyes or feel that they are somehow not qualified. I certainly had to fight that feeling in myself in order to write about it.

The customer is always right: ‘It’s my money. You have to listen to me’.

The more hardcore conservative you are, the more tightly identified you are with defending the interest of capital as an interest of the system based on hyper-competition, the more likely it is that you vehemently deny climate change. Because if climate change is real, your worldview will come crashing down around you.

When Nike says, just do it, that’s a message of empowerment. Why aren’t the rest of us speaking to young people in a voice of inspiration?

Fossil fuels are – they’re inherently centralized. And you need a lot of infrastructure to get them out, and you need a lot of infrastructure to transport it, as Obama was explaining in front of all that pipe, right? Whereas renewable energy is everywhere.

‘Shocking’ is like a bolt from the blue. It is something external that ruptures your world.

As soon as you write about climate change, the first attempt to discredit you is, ‘Well, you wrote this on a computer,’ or, ‘You took a plane to this conference.’ So your opinion isn’t valid.

We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions. We have a crisis of inequality, and we need climate solutions that solve that crisis.

It’s really, really hard to get in rooms with people you don’t usually work with and try to find common ground.

My sister lives in Oklahoma. And, you know, it is so shocking that James Inhofe, the foremost climate-denying senator, is from the state that is so deeply climate-affected.

I think people are just incredibly depressed and hopeless about the prospects for change.

I am not saying Russia is not important, but Trump’s base is very well defended against that: ‘the liberal media is out to get him’, ‘it’s fake news’, and all the rest.

A large-scale crisis – whether a terrorist attack or a financial crash – would likely provide the pretext to declare some sort of state of exception or emergency, where the usual rules no longer apply.

He was about building up the Trump name and then selling it and leasing it in as many different ways as possible.

When you start talking about sacrifices, pretty soon people start feeling like chumps.

There are things that government can do to incentivize the free market to do a better job, yes. But is that a replacement for getting in the way, actively, of the fossil fuel industry and preventing them from destroying our chances of a future on a livable planet? It’s not a replacement.

For someone with a background of economic justice, what scared me about climate change is not just that the sea level will rise and we’ll have more storms – it’s how this intersects with that cocktail of inequality and racism.

The electoral strategy for 2016 was, ‘Vote for me; I’m not Trump,’ and, ‘Trump is dangerous, so get out and vote.’

In the midst of the pain and panic of the Great Depression, as many as 2 million people of Mexican descent were expelled from the United States.

There is some pretty powerful self-interest in wanting a future that is not just running storm-to-storm. The argument that I make is not that we aren’t competitive and selfish and greedy. We are. We’re all of these things. We’re complicated, competitive, greedy and nasty, and kind and generous and compassionate.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other.

Here in Canada, the people who oppose the tar sands most forcefully are Indigenous people living downstream from the tar sands. They are not opposing it because of climate change – they are opposing it because it poisons their bodies.

I am about safety for the people and the planet.

I’ve never seen a movement spread as fast as the fossil fuel divestment movement.

Throughout U.S. history, national crises have been used to suspend constitutional protections and attack basic rights. After the Civil War, with the nation in crisis, the promise of 40 acres and a mule to freed slaves was promptly betrayed.

The Trump family’s business model is part of a broader shift in corporate structure that has taken place within many brand-based multinationals, one with transformative impacts on culture and the job market, trends that I wrote about in my first book, ‘No Logo: Taking Aim at the Brand Bullies’.

What I hope is less about what the greens will do but what people who don’t consider themselves part of the green movement will do.

I want to act, if I can, as a bridge for people who read ‘Shock Doctrine’ or ‘No Logo’. People who are sitting out for whatever reasons.