338 Quotes by Naomi Klein

Because one of the greatest misconceptions in the climate debate is that our society is refusing to change, protecting a status quo called “business-as-usual.” The truth is that there is no business-as-usual. The energy sector is changing dramatically all the time – but the vast majority of those changes are taking us in precisely the wrong direction, toward energy sources with even higher planet-warming emissions than their conventional versions.

Climate change is like that; it’s hard to keep it in your head for very long. We engage in this odd form of on-again-off-again ecological amnesia for perfectly rational reasons. We deny because we fear that letting in the full reality of this crisis will change everything. And we are right.5.

Countries, like people, don’t reboot to zero with a good shock; they just break and keep on breaking.

As many are coming to realize, the fetish for structurelessness, the rebellion against any kind of institutionalization, is not a luxury today’s transformative movements can afford.

During disasters, you hear a lot of praise for human resilience. And we are a remarkably resilient species. But that’s not always good. It seems a great many of us can get used to almost anything, even the steady annihilation of our own habitat.

Very little, however, has been written about how market fundamentalism has, from the very first moments, systematically sabotaged our collective response to climate change, a threat that came knocking just as this ideology was reaching its zenith.

We are looking to brands for poetry and for spirituality, because we’re not getting those things from our communities or from each other. 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?

So, if consumers are like roaches, then marketers must forever be dreaming up new concoctions for industrial-strength Raid.

It is our predicament that we live in a finite world, and yet we behave as if it were infinite.