Top 120 Ralph Nader Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “For almost seventy years the life insurance industry has been a smug sacred cow feeding the public a steady line of sacred bull.”

— Ralph Nader

52. “Competition, free enterprise, and an open market were never meant to be symbolic fig leaves for corporate socialism and monopolistic capitalism.”

— Ralph Nader

53. “Young wives are the leading asset of corporate power. They want the suburbs, a house, a settled life, and respectability. They want society to see that they have exchanged themselves for something of value.”

— Ralph Nader

54. “Arbitration is private. It doesn’t have the tools to dig into the corporate files. It’s usually controlled by arbitrators who want repeat business from corporations not from the injured person.”

— Ralph Nader

55. “Members of Congress are like the voters in one respect – they want to go with the winners.”

— Ralph Nader

56. “The world is shaped by different people with certain personalities that come out of different upbringings.”

— Ralph Nader

57. “People are interested in family traditions, and I think a lot of families can benefit from some of the ways that my parents dealt with the challenges of raising four kids.”

— Ralph Nader

58. “The flow from knowledge to action draws upon the complete person with his or her catalyst and synergistic potential.”

— Ralph Nader

59. “Word of mouth is the most effective means of communication.”

— Ralph Nader

60. “I don’t like too much by-standing, on-looking, and spectator-behavior in people’s lives.”

— Ralph Nader

61. “People are stunned to hear that one company has data files on 185 million Americans.”

— Ralph Nader

62. “The lesser of two evils, or the least of the worst, is not good enough for the American people anymore.”

— Ralph Nader

63. “To top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole.”

— Ralph Nader

64. “This welfare for wealthy companies wastes taxpayer dollars, harms the environment, and makes a mockery of the recent reductions in federal social spending programs.”

— Ralph Nader

65. “General Motors could buy Delaware if DuPont were willing to sell it.”

— Ralph Nader

66. “The accountability of government has gone to the point where the very use of the law is the instrument of illegality.”

— Ralph Nader

67. “If, during the Second World War, the United States had retooled its factories for manufacturing bicycles instead of munitions, we’d be one of the healthiest, least oil-dependent, and most environmentally-sound constituents in the Nazi empire today.”

— Ralph Nader

68. “The whole story of human history is: The blasphemy of today is the commonplace of tomorrow.”

— Ralph Nader

69. “The nation is faced with one of the most corporate-orientated anti-consumer Congresses in our history.”

— Ralph Nader

70. “I don’t think meals have any business being deductible. I’m for separation of calories and corporations.”

— Ralph Nader

71. “The ‘democracy gap’ in our politics and elections spells a deep sense of powerlessness by people who drop out, do not vote, or listlessly vote for the ‘least worst’ every four years and then wonder why after every cycle the ‘least worst’ gets worse.”

— Ralph Nader

72. “Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans.”

— Ralph Nader

73. “As a public interest lawyer, your fund of injustice will never be empty.”

— Ralph Nader

74. “When do corporations begin to lose their credibility? They fought Social Security, Medicare, auto safety. They fought every social justice movement in this country.”

— Ralph Nader

75. “John D. Rockefeller wanted to dominate oil, but Microsoft wants it all, you name it: cable, media, banking, car dealerships.”

— Ralph Nader

76. “The corporations have become our government. They’re not just influential. Department by department, you name it, they put their people in high government positions, they have 10,000 PACs and 35,000 lobbyists, so there’s no more opening to be heard.”

— Ralph Nader

77. “There is not enough self-consciousness about what a family can be, about what it can inherit from forbearers, and what new traditions it can start as a contributor to the community.”

— Ralph Nader

78. “The Israeli puppeteer travels to Washington and meets with the puppet in the White House. He then goes down Pennsylvania Avenue and meets with the puppets in Congress. The Israeli leader then ‘brings back millions of dollars’ in aid to Israel.”

— Ralph Nader

79. “This country has far more problems than it deserves and far more solutions than it applies.”

— Ralph Nader

80. “Ronald Reagan is the most ignorant president since Warren Harding.”

— Ralph Nader

81. “Every time I see something terrible, it’s like I see it at age 19. I keep a freshness that way.”

— Ralph Nader

82. “The shortcomings of America’s political leaders do not stop at our borders.”

— Ralph Nader

83. “Up against the corporate government, voters find themselves asked to choose between look-alike candidates from two parties vying to see who takes the marching orders from their campaign paymasters and their future employers. The money of vested interest nullifies genuine voter choice and trust.”

— Ralph Nader

84. “The concept of individual with a conscience is one whose highest allegiance is to his fellow man.”

— Ralph Nader

85. “The various Social Security privatization schemes, full and partial, would cost both the ‘social’ – that is the public, cooperative, societal – element of the program and ‘security’ – the rock-solid income guarantee afforded by the system. It should be rejected.”

— Ralph Nader

86. “We have an underdeveloped democracy and overdeveloped plutocracy.”

— Ralph Nader

87. “End perverse incentives that reward Wall Street speculators.”

— Ralph Nader

88. “I think George W. Bush’s personality was overwhelmingly shaped in negative ways by his upbringing.”

— Ralph Nader

89. “No presidential candidate should visit Las Vegas without condemning organized gambling.”

— Ralph Nader

90. “The reason that democracies always defeat dictatorships is because they’re open to debate. We should never allow Washington to say, ‘Shut up, get in line and wave the flag.’”

— Ralph Nader

91. “When people ask, ‘Why should the rich pay a larger percent of their income than middle-income people?’ My answer is not an answer most people get: It’s because their power developed from laws that enriched them.”

— Ralph Nader

92. “It was an injured worker finding a lawyer on a contingent fee in a little town in Texas that blew the top off one of the greatest industrial disasters in American history.”

— Ralph Nader

93. “We don’t measure whether an economy is developing. We just measure whether companies are selling more, whether inventories are up or down, not whether the health, safety and economic well-being of people are being advanced.”

— Ralph Nader

94. “President Reagan was elected on the promise of getting government off the backs of the people and now he demands that government wrap itself around the waists of the people.”

— Ralph Nader

95. “Things have gotten so bad in this country, you look back at Richard Nixon with nostalgia.”

— Ralph Nader

96. “The corporations are worried about their reputational damage and a lot of the social media inflicts that, but it’s hard to measure it.”

— Ralph Nader

97. “Our founders did not oust George III in order for us to crown Richard I.”

— Ralph Nader

98. “It is fascinating to watch legislators turn away from their usual corporate grips when they hear the growing thunder of the people.”

— Ralph Nader

99. “A citizenship of wholesale delegation and abdication to public and private power systems, such as prevails now, makes such periodic checks as elections little more than rituals.”

— Ralph Nader

100. “Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked.”

— Ralph Nader