Top 150 Naomi Klein Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine. ” Only a crisis-actual or percieved-produces real change. When the crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

— Naomi Klein

52. “Our enslavement to oil has required the repression of millions of Arab people. As they shake off their bonds, so must we.”

— Naomi Klein

53. “Our economy takes endlessly from workers, asking more and more from them in ever-tighter time frames, even as employers offer less and less security and lower wages in return.”

— Naomi Klein

54. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

55. “To allow arcane trade law, which has been negotiated with scant public scrutiny, to have this kind of power over an issue so critical to humanity’s future is a special kind of madness. As Nobel Prize–winning economist Joseph Stiglitz puts it, “Should you let a group of foolish lawyers, who put together something before they understood these issues, interfere with saving the planet?”

— Naomi Klein

56. “We know that if we continue on our current path of allowing emissions to rise year after year, climate change will change everything about our world. Major cities will very likely drown, ancient cultures will be swallowed by the seas, and there is a very high chance that our children will spend a great deal of their lives fleeing and recovering from vicious storms and extreme droughts. And we don’t have to do anything to bring about this future.”

— Naomi Klein

57. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

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

— Naomi Klein

59. “The bottom line is that we are all inclined to denial when the truth is too costly – whether emotionally, intellectually, or financially. As Upton Sinclair famously observed: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”36.”

— Naomi Klein

60. “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

61. “What if it’s all a hoax and we’ve created a better world for nothing?”

— Naomi Klein

62. “Climate change has never received the crisis treatment from our leaders, despite the fact that it carries the risk of destroying lives on a vastly greater scale than collapsed banks or collapsed buildings.”

— Naomi Klein

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

— Naomi Klein

64. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

65. “So my mind keeps coming back to the question: what is wrong with us? What is really preventing us from putting out the fire that is threatening to burn down our collective house? I think the answer is far more simple than many have led us to believe: we have not done the things that are necessary to lower emissions because those things fundamentally conflict with deregulated capitalism, the reigning ideology for the entire period we have been struggling to find a way out of this crisis.”

— Naomi Klein

66. “The three policy pillars of this new era are familiar to us all: privatization of the public sphere, deregulation of the corporate sector, and lower corporate taxation, paid for with cuts to public spending.”

— Naomi Klein

67. “It has no denim-toned house paint. Levi makes what is essentially a commodity: blue jeans. Its ads may evoke rugged outdoorsmanship, but Levi hasn’t promoted any particular life style to sell other products.”

— Naomi Klein

68. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

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

— Naomi Klein

70. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

71. “There is simply no way to square a belief system that vilifies collective action and venerates total market freedom with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that created and are deepening the crisis.”

— Naomi Klein

72. “Just as tobacco companies have been obliged to pay the costs of helping people to quit smoking, and BP has had to pay for much of the cleanup of its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, it is high time for the industry to at least split the bill for the climate crisis.”

— Naomi Klein

73. “If we are ever to cope with climate change in any fundamental way, radical solutions on the social side are where we must focus, though. The relative efficiency of the next generation of solar cells is trivial by comparison.”

— Naomi Klein

74. “A more accurate term for a system that erases the boundaries between Big Government and Big Business is not liberal, conservative or capitalist but corporatist. Its main characteristics are huge transfers of public wealth to private hands, often accompanied by exploding debt, an ever-widening chasm between the dazzling rich and the disposable poor and an aggressive nationalism that justifies bottomless spending on security. For.”

— Naomi Klein

75. “We face so many overlapping and intersecting crises that we can’t afford to fix them one at a time. We need integrated solutions, solutions that radically bring down emissions while creating huge numbers of good, unionized jobs and delivering meaningful justice to those who have been most abused and excluded under the current extractive economy.”

— Naomi Klein

76. “Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests. A belief system that vilifies collective action and declares war on all corporate regulation and all things public simply cannot be reconciled with a problem that demands collective action on an unprecedented scale and a dramatic reining in of the market forces that are largely responsible for creating and deepening the crisis.”

— Naomi Klein

77. “People without memory are putty.”

— Naomi Klein

78. “Renewables are, in fact, much more reliable than power based on extraction, since those energy models require continuous new inputs to avoid a crash, whereas once the initial investment has been made in renewable energy infrastructure, nature provides the raw materials for free.”

— Naomi Klein

79. “As the political scientist Michael Wolfe puts it, “Conservatives cannot govern well for the same reason that vegetarians cannot prepare a world-class boeuf bourguignon: If you believe that what you are called upon to do is wrong, you are unlikely to do it very well.” He adds, “As a way of governing, conservatism is another name for disaster.”30.”

— Naomi Klein

80. “The slogan for contemporary capitalism – fear and disorder are the catalysts for each new leap forward.”

— Naomi Klein

81. “Fear of “the other” may be an animating force for many supporters of far-right parties, but “inclusion” of the other within an inherently unjust system will not be powerful enough to defeat those forces.”

— Naomi Klein

82. “According to Stephen Pacala, director of the Princeton Environmental Institute and codirector of Princeton’s Carbon Mitigation Initiative, the roughly 500 million richest of us on the planet are responsible for about half of all global emissions. That would include the rich in every country in the world, notably in countries like China and India, as well significant parts of the middle classes in North America and Europe.”

— Naomi Klein

83. “Nonetheless, that order has now been destabilized, which means that the rest of us are going to have to quickly figure out how to turn “managed degrowth” into something that looks a lot less like the Great Depression and a lot more like what some innovative economic thinkers have taken to calling “The Great Transition.”56.”

— Naomi Klein

84. “The fences that protect the public interest seem to be fast disappearing, while the ones that restrict our liberties keep multiplying.”

— Naomi Klein

85. “What industry calls innovation, in other words, looks more like the final suicidal throes of addiction. We are blasting the bedrock of our continents, pumping our water with toxins, lopping off mountaintops, scraping off boreal forests, endangering the deep ocean, and scrambling to exploit the melting Arctic – all to get at the last drops and the final rocks. Yes, some very advanced technology is making this possible, but it’s not innovation, it’s madness.”

— Naomi Klein

86. “Climate change detonates the ideological scaffolding on which contemporary conservatism rests.”

— Naomi Klein

87. “Those looking for ideology in the White House should consider this: For the men who rule our world, rules are for other people.”

— Naomi Klein

88. “It wins every time we accept that we have only bad choices available to us: austerity or extraction, poisoning or poverty.”

— Naomi Klein

89. “There is a phrase Argentines use to describe the paradox of wide-eyed knowing and eyes-closed terror that was the dominant state of mind in those years: “We did not know what nobody could deny.”

— Naomi Klein

90. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

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

— Naomi Klein

92. “It’s not simply that these “cool dudes” deny climate science because it threatens to upend their dominance-based worldview. It is that their dominance-based worldview provides them with the intellectual tools to write off huge swaths of humanity, and indeed, to rationalize profiting from the meltdown.”

— Naomi Klein

93. “Since many of today’s best-known manufacturers no longer produce products and advertise them, but rather buy products and “brand” them, these companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images.”

— Naomi Klein

94. “We do not always respond to shocks with regression. Sometimes, in the face of crisis, we grow up – fast.”

— Naomi Klein

95. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

96. “The theory of economic shock therapy relies in part on the roleof expectations on feeding an inflationary process. Reining in inflation requires not only changing monetary policy but also changing the behavior of consumers, employers and workers. The role of a sudden, jarring policy shift is that it quickly alters expectations, signaling to the public that the rules of the game have changed dramatically – prices will not keep rising, nor will wages.”

— Naomi Klein

97. “In early 2013, I came across a speech by Mississauga Nishnaabeg writer and educator Leanne Simpson, in which she describes her people’s teachings and governance structures like this: “Our systems are designed to promote more life.”

— Naomi Klein

98. “Populations of songbirds like the pied flycatcher, meanwhile, are collapsing in some parts of Europe because the caterpillars that parents depend upon to feed their young are hatching too early.”

— Naomi Klein

99. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

100. “In other words, changing the earth’s climate in ways that will be chaotic and disastrous is easier to accept than the prospect of changing the fundamental, growth-based, profit-seeking logic of capitalism.”

— Naomi Klein