Top 196 Quotes & Sayings by Naomi Klein
Explore popular quotes and sayings by a Canadian journalist Naomi Klein.
Last updated on December 21, 2024.
I think I would say that there is absolutely no way to reconcile an austerity agenda with climate action. Our political class needs to understand that the fight against austerity and the fight for climate action are the same fight.
That is the core of Trump. He is undoubtedly an idiot, but do not underestimate how good he is at that.
If you're biking more and walking more, you're going to be happier and healthier. And you'll probably feel better if you take out less garbage, as most of us feel pretty crappy about that. But I don't think we can mistake those acts for doing what it takes to address a crisis at a global level.
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.
Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.
Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.
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.
What we know is that the environmental movement had a series of dazzling victories in the late '60s and in the '70s where the whole legal framework for responding to pollution and to protecting wildlife came into law. It was just victory after victory after victory. And these were what came to be called 'command-and-control' pieces of legislation.
The problem with Donald Trump is that he went and designed a brand that is entirely amoral.
I've never seen a movement spread as fast as the fossil fuel divestment movement.
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.
One shouldn't gamble with what is irreplaceable and precious.
I do believe that our ability to jam the Trump brand is somewhat limited. I think we can chip away at it, but ultimately, the way to undermine the Trump brand is a better product in the political marketplace, if you'll forgive the capitalist metaphor.
As I explored Trump's inextricable relationship with his commercial brand, and its implications for the future of politics, I began to see why so many of the attacks on him have failed to stick - and how we can identify ways of resisting him that will be more effective.
I don't think there could've been a pitch as crass as Trump's 'I can fix America because I'm rich' without that groundwork laid by Davos and the Clinton Global Initiative.
We can't leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don't regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.
The reason why nothing sticks to Trump - or very little sticks to Trump - is that he created this brand idea that has to do with being the guy who gets away from it.
There is a triple layer of jargon when writing about climate change. You have the scientists, who are very cautious now because of the amount of climate denial. Then you have the U.N. jargon - I had to carry around a glossary of terms. It was like an alphabet soup.
The customer is always right: 'It's my money. You have to listen to me'.
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 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.
We have a structural problem because you can simultaneously understand the medium to long-term risks of climate change and also come to the conclusion that it is in your short-term economic interest to invest in oil and gas. Which is why, you know, anybody who tells you that the market is going to fix this on its own is lying to you.
Change or be changed, right? And what we mean by that is that climate change, if we don't change course, if we don't change our political and economic system, is going to change everything about our physical world.
We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we're not getting those things from our communities or from each other.
Brands like Starbucks came along and talked about their brand as itself being a community, the idea that Starbucks is what they like to call a 'third place,' which is not their idea; it's the idea of basic citizenry needing a place that is not work, that is not home, where citizens gather.
The truly powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on the most rarified delicacy of all: impunity.
We live in a society that is powered by fossil fuels, but for the meantime, we're in it. Maybe there's, like, five people living in the woods off-grid, but they're spending all their time maintaining that, and they don't have much time left over for anything else.
I think there has been this really bad habit of environmentalists being insufferably smug, where they are sort of saying, 'This is the issue that beats all other issues,' or, 'Your issue doesn't matter because nothing matters if the earth is fried.'
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.
Since the 1980s, we've been living in this era, really, of corporate rule, based on this idea that the role of government is to liberate the power of capital so that they can have as much economic growth as quickly as possible, and then all good things will flow from that.
The electoral strategy for 2016 was, 'Vote for me; I'm not Trump,' and, 'Trump is dangerous, so get out and vote.'
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.
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.
There have been presidents with business interests before. But there has never been a fully commercialized global brand as a sitting U.S. president. That is unprecedented.
If David Duke got the percentage of the vote that Le Pen got, we would be terrified, as well we should be.
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.
I think there's a couple of things going on. One is that Trump's relationship with his base is not the traditional relationship of a politician and the people who elected him, and the constituency, which is a relationship of some accountability, right? The idea is that the politicians are working for the people. They're public servants.
Maybe Trump himself will be voted out through impeachment, right?
I was having a lot of people ask me to update 'The Shock Doctrine' and add a chapter about Trump.
Because the Republicans are never going to turn on Trump so long as he still has his base, and he will continue to have his base so long as this idea that he is standing up for workers, it remains intact. And the only way that that gets eroded is if it isn't just about Russia all the time, but is also about those economic betrayals.
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.
If you look at the polling around climate change in this country before 'Sandy', that was kind of the low point in terms of Americans believing that climate change was real and that humans were causing it.
A state of shock is what results when a gap opens up between events and our initial ability to explain them. When we find ourselves in that position, without a story, without our moorings, a great many people become vulnerable to authority figures telling us to fear one another and relinquish our rights for the greater good.
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.
Nike was the essence of sports, transcendence through sports.
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?
The Trump Organization is paid millions of dollars by these developers for the privilege of putting the Trump name on those towers.
That's the big mistake the environmental movement made - 'We'll scare the hell out of you, and you'll become an activist'.
I don't think you can understand Trump's relationship to his voters and how he gets away with what he gets away with, without understanding the pact between a lifestyle brand and its consumer base and how that really transformed the global economy in the 1990s.
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.
'Shocking' is like a bolt from the blue. It is something external that ruptures your world.
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 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.
Among my generation, there was a purist position that any contact with electoral politics was an unforgiveable compromise.
I can tell you Donald Trump's products may not be made in America, but Donald Trump was made in America.
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.
I really did have this powerful sense, when I was in New Orleans after the storm, of watching all these profiteers descend on Baton Rouge to lobby to get rid of the housing projects and privatise the school system - I thought I was in some science-fiction experiment.
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'.
Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.
Look at the structure of the Gates Foundation and this idea that, rather than trying to solve these huge global problems through institutions with some kind of democracy and transparency baked into them, we're just going to outsource it to benevolent billionaires.
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