338 Quotes by Naomi Klein

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.

Not only do fossil fuel companies receive $775 billion to $1 trillion in annual global subsidies, but they pay nothing for the privilege of treating our shared atmosphere as a free waste dump – a fact that has been described by the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change as “the greatest market failure the world has ever seen.

The world now has a new kind of hero, one who listens more than speaks, who preaches in riddles not in certainties, a leader who doesn’t show his face, who says his mask is really a mirror. And in the Zapatistas, we have not one dream of a revolution, but a dreaming revolution.

The recent spate of disasters has translated into such spectacular profits that many people around the world have come to the same conclusion: the rich and powerful must be deliberately causing the catastrophes so that they can exploit them.

So if Obama’s energy policy is “all of the above” – which effectively means full steam ahead with fossil fuel extraction, complemented with renewables around the margins – Blockadia is responding with a tough philosophy that might be described as “None of the below.” It is based on the simple principle that it’s time to stop digging up poisons from the deep and shift, with all speed, to powering our lives from the abundant energies on our planet’s surface.

Fear is a survival response. Fear makes us run, it makes us leap, it can make us act superhuman. But we need somewhere to run to. Without that, the fear is only paralyzing. So the real trick, the only hope, really, is to allow the terror of an unlivable future to be balanced and soothed by the prospect of building something much better than many of us have previously dared hope.

This same economic system, based on short-term growth and endless profits is also the reason for pretty much everything else that is lousy in our society, from private prisons to Fox News. What I’m arguing is that, in fact, what we’ve been told is a lie.

These two trends – the decline of communal institutions and the expansion of corporate brands in our culture – have had an inverse, seesaw-like relationship to one another over the decades: as the influence of those institutions that provided us with that essential sense of belonging went down, the power of commercial brands went up.

I’m not looking to overthrow the American government, the corporate state already has. – JOHN TRUDELL.