338 Quotes by Naomi Klein

Between 2008 and 2010, at least 261 patents were filed related to growing “climate-ready” crops – seeds supposedly able to withstand extreme weather conditions; of these patents close to 80 percent were controlled by six agribusiness giants, including Monsanto and Syngenta.

Regardless of the overall state of the economy, there is now a large enough elite made up of new multi-millionaires and billionaires for Wall Street to see the group as “superconsumers,” able to carry consumer demand all on their own.

Indeed the roots of the climate crisis date back to core civilizational myths on which post-Enlightenment Western culture is founded – myths about humanity’s duty to dominate a natural world that is believed to be at once limitless and entirely controllable.

Put differently, the liberation of world markets, a process powered by the liberation of unprecedented amounts of fossil fuels from the earth, has dramatically sped up the same process that is liberating Arctic ice from existence.

Terrorism doesn’t just blow up buildings; it blasts every other issue off the political map. The spectre of terrorism – real and exaggerated – has become a shield of impunity, protecting governments around the world from scrutiny for their human rights abuses.

We as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a ‘thing-oriented society’ to a ’person-oriented society.

The goal is all-out war on the public sphere and the public interest, whether in the form of antipollution regulations or programs for the hungry. In their place will be unfettered power and freedom for corporations.

The creation of today’s market society was not the result of a sequence of spontaneous events but rather of state interference and violence.

What Chile pioneered under Pinochet was an evolution of corporatism: a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector – the workers – thereby drastically increasing the alliance’s share of the national wealth.