17 Quotes by Kalle Lasn

In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.

The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed.

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped.

In the Soviet Union you weren’t allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors.

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us – by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down.

Corporations are not legal “persons” with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control.

Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago.

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial.

It’s a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it.