Top 150 Naomi Klein Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

102. “Reagan filled his inner circle with pro-industry scientists who denied the reality of every environmental ill from acid rain to climate change. And seemingly overnight, banning and tightly regulating harmful industrial practices went from being bipartisan political practice to a symptom of “command and control environmentalism.”

— Naomi Klein

103. “President Franklin D. Roosevelt spoke out strongly against war profiteers, saying, “I don’t want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster.”

— Naomi Klein

104. “Clinton’s brand of identity politics does not challenge the system that produced and entrenched these inequalities, but seeks only to make that system more “inclusive.”

— Naomi Klein

105. “When Jonas Salk, a scientist at the University of Pittsburgh, found it and developed the first polio vaccine in 1952, he did not patent the lifesaving treatment. “There is no patent,” Salk told the broadcaster Edward R. Murrow: “Could you patent the sun?”

— Naomi Klein

106. “From Chile to China to Iraq, torture has been a silent partner in the global free-market crusade.”

— Naomi Klein

107. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

108. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

109. “The Apprentice delivered the central sales pitch of free-market theory, telling viewers that by unleashing your most selfish and ruthless side, you are actually a hero – creating jobs and fueling growth. Don’t be nice, be a killer.”

— Naomi Klein

110. “And yet these protests have also shown that saying no is not enough. If opposition movements are to do more than burn bright and then burn out, they will need a comprehensive vision for what should emerge in the place of our failing system, as well as serious political strategies for how to achieve those goals.”

— Naomi Klein

111. “In New Orleans after Katrina, some of the key players who now surround Trump showed to what lengths they will go to decimate the public sphere and advance the interests of real estate developers, private contractors, and oil companies.”

— Naomi Klein

112. “In the Southern Cone, where contemporary capitalism was born, the “War on Terror” was a war against all obstacles to the new order.”

— Naomi Klein

113. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

114. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

115. “Like Russia’s gangsterism and Bush’s cronyism, contemporary Iraq is a creation of the fifty-year crusade to privatize the world. Rather than being disowned by its creators, it deserves to be seen as the purest incarnation yet of the ideology that gave it birth.”

— Naomi Klein

116. “The dirty secret of the neoliberal era is that these ideas were never defeated in a great battle of ideas, nor were they voted down in elections. They were shocked out of the way at key political junctures.”

— Naomi Klein

117. “Trump’s political career would have been impossible without the degradation of the whole idea of the public sphere, which has been unfolding over decades. It could never have happened without the idea that “government is not the solution, it is the problem,” as Ronald Reagan famously put it. And it could never have happened had that message not been followed up with decades of deregulation that essentially legalized bribery, with outrageous sums of corporate money flowing into politics.”

— Naomi Klein

118. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

119. “This is what Keynes had meant when he warned of the dangers of economic chaos – you never know what combination of rage, racism and revolution will be unleashed.”

— Naomi Klein

120. “So if Obama’s energy policy is “all of the above” – which effectively means full steam ahead with fossil fuel extraction, complemented with renewables around the margins – Blockadia is responding with a tough philosophy that might be described as “None of the below.” It is based on the simple principle that it’s time to stop digging up poisons from the deep and shift, with all speed, to powering our lives from the abundant energies on our planet’s surface.”

— Naomi Klein

121. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

122. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

123. “Katrina was not unforeseeable. It was the result of a political structure that subcontracts its responsibility to private contractors and abdicates its responsibility altogether. – Harry Belafonte, American musician and civil rights activist, September 20052.”

— Naomi Klein

124. “That is what makes the Bush regime different: after the attacks of September 11, it dared to demand the right to torture without shame. That left the administration subject to criminal prosecution – a problem it dealt with by changing the laws.”

— Naomi Klein

125. “Trump didn’t just enter politics as a so-called outsider, somebody who doesn’t play by the rules. He entered politics playing by a completely different set of rules – the rules of branding. According to those rules, you don’t need to be objectively good or decent; you only need to be true and consistent to the brand you have created.”

— Naomi Klein

126. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

127. “What we cannot expect is that the people least responsible for this crisis will foot all, or even most, of the bill. Because that is a recipe for catastrophic amounts of carbon ending up in our common atmosphere. Like the call to honor our treaties and other land-sharing agreements with Indigenous peoples, climate change is once again forcing us to look at how injustices that many assumed were safely buried in the past are shaping our shared vulnerability to global climate collapse.”

— Naomi Klein

128. “Living with this kind of cognitive dissonance is simply part of being alive at this jarring moment in history, when a crisis we have been studiously ignoring is hitting us in the face– and yet we are doubling down on the stuff that is causing the crisis in the first place.”

— Naomi Klein

129. “It requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, deep subsidies for green alternatives, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations – the list of ideological outrages goes on and.”

— Naomi Klein

130. “The ability to discount darker people and darker nations in order to justify stealing their land and labor was foundational, and none of it would have been possible without those theories of racial supremacy that gave the whole morally bankrupt system a patina of legal respectability. In other words, economics was never separable from “identity politics,” certainly not in colonial nations like the United States – so why would it suddenly be today?”

— Naomi Klein

131. “No one has more legal power to halt the reckless expansion of the tar sands than the First Nations living downstream whose treaty-protected hunting, fishing, and trapping grounds have already been fouled, just as no one has more legal power to halt the rush to drill under the Arctic’s melting ice than Inuit, Sami, and other northern Indigenous tribes whose livelihoods would be jeopardized by an offshore oil spill. Whether they are able to exercise those rights is another matter.”

— Naomi Klein

132. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

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

— Naomi Klein

134. “No country offered more lucrative conditions than China: low taxes and tariffs, corruptible officials and, most of all, a plentiful low-wage workforce that, for many years, would be unwilling to risk demanding decent salaries or the most basic workplace protections for fear of the most violent reprisals.”

— Naomi Klein

135. “Trump created a brand that is entirely amoral. On the campaign trail, Trump was able to shrug off almost every conventional “gotcha.” Caught dodging federal taxes? That’s just being “smart.” Wouldn’t reveal his tax returns? Who’s going to make him? He was only half joking on the campaign trail when he said, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” In Trump’s world, impunity, even more than lots of gold, is the ultimate signifier of success.”

— Naomi Klein

136. “The private sector is ill suited to taking on most of these large infrastructure investments: if the services are to be accessible, which they must be in order to be effective, the profit margins that attract private players simply aren’t there.”

— Naomi Klein

137. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

138. “If we are to curb emissions in the next decade, we need a massive mobilization larger than any in history. We need a Marshall Plan for the Earth. This plan must mobilize financing and technology transfer on scales never seen before. It must get technology onto the ground in every country to ensure we reduce.”

— Naomi Klein

139. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

140. “All we have to do is not react as if this is a full-blown crisis. All we have to do is keep on denying how frightened we actually are. And then, bit by bit, we will have arrived at the place we most fear, the thing from which we have been averting our eyes. No additional effort required. There are ways of preventing this.”

— Naomi Klein

141. “We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. – George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four.”

— Naomi Klein

142. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

143. “Deep emission cuts in the wealthy nations have to start immediately.”

— Naomi Klein

144. “In much of the Southern Hemisphere, neo liberalism is frequently spoken of as “the second colonial pillage”: in the first pillage, the riches were seized from the land, and in the second they were stripped from the state.”

— Naomi Klein

145. “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?”

— Naomi Klein

146. “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.”

— Naomi Klein

147. “Memory, both individual and collective, turns out to be the greatest shock absorber of all.”

— Naomi Klein

148. “The very idea that we, as atomized individuals, even lots of atomized individuals, could play a significant part in stabilizing the planet’s climate system or changing the global economy is objectively nuts. We can only meet this tremendous challenge together, as part of a massive and organized global movement.”

— Naomi Klein

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

— Naomi Klein

150. “This is the one-two punch of an economy built on fossil fuels: lethal when extraction goes wrong and the interred carbon escapes at the source; lethal when extraction goes right and the carbon is successfully released into the atmosphere.”

— Naomi Klein