Top 150 Naomi Klein Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.”

— Naomi Klein

2. “Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn’t filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear.”

— Naomi Klein

3. “In a world where profit is consistently put before both people and the planet, climate economics has everything to do with ethics and morality.”

— Naomi Klein

4. “Information is shock resistance. Arm yourself.”

— Naomi Klein

5. “We can’t leave everything to the free market. In fact, climate change is, I would argue, the greatest single free-market failure. This is what happens when you don’t regulate corporations and you allow them to treat the atmosphere as an open sewer.”

— Naomi Klein

6. “The task is clear: to create a culture of caretaking in which no one and nowhere is thrown away, in which the inherent value of people and all life is foundational.”

— Naomi Klein

7. “I am convinced that climate change represents a historic opportunity on an even greater scale.”

— Naomi Klein

8. “Hope has never trickled down, it has always sprung up.”

— Naomi Klein

9. “We can save ourselves, but only if we let go of the myth of dominance and mastery and learn to work with nature.”

— Naomi Klein

10. “If enough of us stop looking away and decide that climate change is a crisis worthy of Marshall Plan levels of response, then it will become one.”

— Naomi Klein

11. “Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich.”

— Naomi Klein

12. “Communication is my thing.”

— Naomi Klein

13. “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?”

— Naomi Klein

14. “The deeper message that is resonating with people is that it is possible to build. It is possible to invest in people; it is possible to invest in green infrastructure; it’s possible to change.”

— Naomi Klein

15. “It is always easier to deny reality than to allow our worldview to be shattered, a fact that was as true of die-hard Stalinists at the height of the purges as it is of libertarian climate change deniers today.”

— Naomi Klein

16. “You actually cannot sell the idea of freedom, democracy, diversity, as if it were a brand attribute and not reality – not at the same time as you’re bombing people, you can’t.”

— Naomi Klein

17. “There is plenty of room to make a profit in a zero-carbon economy; but the profit motive is not going to be the midwife for that great transformation.”

— Naomi Klein

18. “The triumph of economic globalization has inspired a wave of techno-savvy investigative activists who are as globally minded as the corporations they track.”

— Naomi Klein

19. “The anti-war movement should turn itself into a pro-democracy movement.”

— Naomi Klein

20. “Extreme violence has a way of preventing us from seeing the interests it serves.”

— Naomi Klein

21. “So the need for another economic model is urgent, and if the climate justice movement can show that responding to climate change is the best chance for a more just economic system...”

— Naomi Klein

22. “The powerful feed ideology to the masses like fast food while they dine on that most rarefied delicacy: impunity.”

— Naomi Klein

23. “What haunts me is not exactly the absence of literal space so much as a deep craving for metaphorical space: release, escape, some kind of open-ended freedom.”

— Naomi Klein

24. “In pragmatic terms, our challenge is less to save the earth from ourselves and more to save ourselves from an earth that, if pushed too far, has ample power to rock, burn, and shake us off completely.”

— Naomi Klein

25. “I think there is a danger that an environmental crisis can be used in precisely the same way as the terrorist threat can be used in terms of giving up freedom.”

— Naomi Klein

26. “Ads and logos are our shared global culture and language, and people are insisting on the right to use that language, to reformulate it in the way that artists and writers always do with cultural material,.”

— Naomi Klein

27. “It is our great collective misfortune that the scientific community made its decisive diagnosis of the climate threat at the precise moment when an elite minority was enjoying more unfettered political, cultural, and intellectual power than at any point since the 1920s.”

— Naomi Klein

28. “So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate. But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us. Gentle tweaks to the status quo stopped being a climate option when we supersized the American Dream in the 1990s, and then proceeded to take it global.”

— Naomi Klein

29. “Real climate solutions are ones that steer these interventions to systematically disperse and devolve power and control to the community level, whether through community-controlled renewable energy, local organic agriculture or transit systems genuinely accountable to their users.”

— Naomi Klein

30. “Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you.”

— Naomi Klein

31. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

32. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

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

— Naomi Klein

34. “The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.”

— Naomi Klein

35. “Despite different cultures, middle-class youth all over the world seem to live their lives as if in a parallel universe. They get up in the morning, put on their Levi’s and Nikes, grab their caps and backpacks, and Sony personal CD players and head for school.”

— Naomi Klein

36. “We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth.”

— Naomi Klein

37. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

38. “A term like capitalism is incredibly slippery, because there’s such a range of different kinds of market economies.”

— Naomi Klein

39. “I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back.”

— Naomi Klein

40. “When it comes to paying contractors, the sky is the limit; when it comes to financing the basic functions of the state, the coffers are empty.”

— Naomi Klein

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

— Naomi Klein

42. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

43. “But we need to be very clear: because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.”

— Naomi Klein

44. “What we have been living for three decades is frontier capitalism, with the frontier constantly shifting location from crisis to crisis, moving on as soon as the law catches up.”

— Naomi Klein

45. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

46. “It is a civilizational wake-up call. A powerful message – spoken in the language of fires, floods, droughts, and extinctions – telling us that we need an entirely new economic model and a new way of sharing this planet.”

— Naomi Klein

47. “My favorite sign says, ‘I care about you.’ In a culture that trains people to avoid each other’s gaze, to say ‘Let them die,’ that is a deeply radical statement.”

— Naomi Klein

48. “Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns.”

— Naomi Klein

49. “This is another lesson from the transformative movements of the past: all of them understood that the process of shifting cultural values – though somewhat ephemeral and difficult to quantify – was central to their work. And so they dreamed in public, showed humanity a better version of itself, modeled different values in their own behavior, and in the process liberated the political imagination and rapidly altered the sense of what was possible.”

— Naomi Klein

50. “So we are left with a stark choice: allow climate disruption to change everything about our world, or change pretty much everything about our economy to avoid that fate.”

— Naomi Klein