Top 120 Ralph Nader Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Your best teacher is your last mistake.”

— Ralph Nader

2. “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”

— Ralph Nader

Featured in: Leadership Quotes, Empowerment Quotes

3. “The job of a leader today is not to create followers. It’s to create more leaders.”

— Ralph Nader

4. “If you always vote for the lesser of two evils, you will always have evil, and you will always have less.”

— Ralph Nader

5. “A leader has the vision and conviction that a dream can be achieved. He inspires the power and energy to get it done.”

— Ralph Nader

6. “Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity...”

— Ralph Nader

7. “There’s no better policy in a society then pursuing a health and safety of its people.”

— Ralph Nader

8. “We must strive to become good ancestors.”

— Ralph Nader

9. “If you’re not turned on by politics, politics will turn on you.”

— Ralph Nader

10. “A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.”

— Ralph Nader

11. “The essence of globalization is a subordination of human rights, of labor rights, consumer, environmental rights, democracy rights, to the imperatives of global trade and investment.”

— Ralph Nader

12. “Capitalism will always survive, because socialism will be there to save it.”

— Ralph Nader

13. “The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.”

— Ralph Nader

14. “Information is the currency of democracy. It’s denial must always be suspect.”

— Ralph Nader

15. “Annual drug deaths: tobacco: 395,000, alcohol: 125,000, ‘legal’ drugs: 38,000, illegal drug overdoses: 5,200, marijuana: 0. Considering government subsidies of tobacco, just what is our government protecting us from in the drug war?”

— Ralph Nader

16. “The civil justice system is a backup system when the criminal justice system fails.”

— Ralph Nader

17. “Looking at virtual reality through computer screens, video game screens, and above all television screens is a denial of personality development. It’s a denial of socialization, of expansion of vocabulary, of interaction with real human beings.”

— Ralph Nader

18. “We are practicing what we preach so that we may preach what we practice.”

— Ralph Nader

19. “If you choose the lesser of two evils, you are still choosing evil.”

— Ralph Nader

20. “The only true aging is the erosion of one’s ideals.”

— Ralph Nader

21. “I once said to my father, when I was a boy, ‘Dad we need a third political party.’ He said to me, ‘I’ll settle for a second.’”

— Ralph Nader

22. “There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.”

— Ralph Nader

23. “Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations.”

— Ralph Nader

24. “Secrecy destroys accountability.”

— Ralph Nader

25. “Power has to be insecure to be responsive.”

— Ralph Nader

26. “Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn’t even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.”

— Ralph Nader

27. “You should not allow yourself the luxuries of discouragement of despair. Bounce back immediately, and welcome the adversity because it produces harder thinking and harder drive to get to the objective.”

— Ralph Nader

28. “Families are incubators for citizen activists.”

— Ralph Nader

29. “Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.”

— Ralph Nader

30. “The only difference between the Republican and Democratic parties is the velocities with which their knees hit the floor when corporations knock on their door. That’s the only difference.”

— Ralph Nader

31. “Family values stand up to injustice and power outside the household.”

— Ralph Nader

32. “The clinical definition of “fascism” is when private concentrated economic power takes government away from the people, turns government into a guarantor, a subsidizer, a covering of corporate power.”

— Ralph Nader

33. “National security is the fig leaf against freedom of information.”

— Ralph Nader

34. “The corporations don’t like open courts of law, trials by jury. They want to privatize by pushing people into compulsory arbitration where they win most of the time and the whole process is pretty secret.”

— Ralph Nader

35. “Addiction should never be treated as a crime. It has to be treated as a health problem. We do not send alcoholics to jail in this country. Over 500,000 people are in our jails who are nonviolent drug users.”

— Ralph Nader

36. “A wasteful defense is a weak defense.”

— Ralph Nader

37. “If you know what’s going on and know how society can be improved and happiness advanced, you tend to focus on how to get things done that will help health, safety, opportunity, justice, accountability of powerful institutions to the people they are supposed to serve.”

— Ralph Nader

38. “If it is unpatriotic to tear down the flag, which is a symbol of the country, why isn’t it more unpatriotic to desecrate the country itself-to pollute, despoil and ravage the air, land and sea.”

— Ralph Nader

39. “A society with more justice needs less charity.”

— Ralph Nader

40. “The progress of history is to take the impossible and turn it into the possible.”

— Ralph Nader

41. “The World Health Organization has named antibiotic resistance as one of the three major health problems of the new century.”

— Ralph Nader

42. “Is there a number or mark planned for the hand or forehead in a new cashless society? YES, and I have seen the machines that are now ready to put it into operation.”

— Ralph Nader

43. “She was the light of our lives, our anchor, compass and vision.”

— Ralph Nader

44. “The Democratic and Republican parties, two apparently distinct political entities feeding at the same corporate trough.”

— Ralph Nader

45. “Nothing can stop the power of an informed citizenry when it is empowered, organized, and motivated.”

— Ralph Nader

46. “Washington DC is corporate-occupied territory.”

— Ralph Nader

47. “Obviously, the answer to oil spills is to paper-train the tankers.”

— Ralph Nader

48. “For over half a century the automobile has brought death, injury, and the most inestimable sorrow and deprivation to millions of people.”

— Ralph Nader

49. “By the time you rise through the ranks, the culture of homogenization has bred the spirit and imagination out of you.”

— Ralph Nader

50. “If God hadn’t meant for us to eat sugar, he wouldn’t have invented dentists.”

— Ralph Nader