338 Quotes by Naomi Klein

I recently traveled to Iraq, and I am trying to understand the role torture is playing there. We are told it’s about getting information, but I think it’s more than that – I think it may also have had to do with trying to build a model country, about erasing people and then trying to remake them from scratch.

It’s impossible to say how much the decision to use the tsunami as an opportunity for disaster capitalism contributed to the return to civil war.

From the perspective of a fossil fuel company, going after these high-risk carbon deposits is not a matter of choice – it is its fiduciary responsibility to shareholders, who insist on earning the same kinds of mega-profits next year as they did this year and last year. And yet fulfilling that fiduciary responsibility virtually guarantees that the planet will cook.

And that is what is behind the abrupt rise in climate change denial among hardcore conservatives: they have come to understand that as soon as they admit that climate change is real, they will lose the central ideological battle of our time – whether we need to plan and manage our societies to reflect our goals and values, or whether that task can be left to the magic of the market.

It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!

In a post-Sept. 11 world, I thought the prudent use of violence could be therapeutic. – Richard Cohen, a Washington Post columnist, on his support for the invasion of Iraq2.

As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as a means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective.

The fossil fuel companies have known for decades that their core product was warming the planet, and yet they have not only failed to adapt to that reality, they have blocked progress at every turn. Meanwhile, oil and gas companies remain some of the most profitable corporations in history... These companies are rich, quite simply, because they have dumped the cost of cleaning up their mess onto regular people around the world.

Good times make bad policy. – Mohammad Sadli, economic adviser to Indonesia’s General Suharto2.