"Our economic system and our planetary system are now at war … Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it's not the laws of nature"
—Naomi Klein
“Democracy is not just the right to vote, it is the right to live in dignity.”
—Naomi Klein
“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
“The parties with the most gain never show up on the battlefield.”
—Naomi Klein
“our economic system and our planetary system are now at war. Or, more accurately, our economy is at war with many forms of life on earth, including human life. What the climate needs to avoid collapse is a contraction in humanity’s use of resources; what our economic model demands to avoid collapse is unfettered expansion. Only one of these sets of rules can be changed, and it’s not the laws of nature.”
—Naomi Klein
“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
“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.”
—Naomi Klein
“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
“This, without a doubt, is neoliberalism’s single most damaging legacy: the realization of its bleak vision has isolated us enough from one another that it became possible to convince us that we are not just incapable of self-preservation but fundamentally not worth saving.”
—Naomi Klein
“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
“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
"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
"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
"Politics hates a vacuum. If it isn't filled with hope, someone will fill it with fear."
—Naomi Klein
"Free speech is meaningless if the commercial cacophony has risen to the point where no one can hear you."
—Naomi Klein
"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
"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
"Africa is poor because its investors and its creditors are unspeakably rich."
—Naomi Klein