Ralph Nader People Quotations

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.

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.

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

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

Let's not just look at it as taking votes away from Gore. Our support comes from a lot of people.

Sixty-four percent of people polled want a four-way debate. People like debate. They like competition. They like not to fall asleep in front of the TV set, watching the drab debate the dreary.

Neither party can afford to stand tall for the American people and oppose the takeover of our political government by big business,

People want positive politics demonstrating changes and reforms instead of the politics of personality and personal acrimony enveloped in sterile media forays about the tactics of the day.

Not a single candidate who I am aware of ever looks at the American people and says to them, 'Do you want to be more powerful against the rich and powerful? That's why this campaign is so different.

[As a child] I was very interested in books that detailed injustice and how people who are underdogs were mistreated throughout history.

I have a consistent rule: The American people should know as much about the Pentagon as the Soviet Union and China do, as much about General Motors as Ford does, and as much about City Bank as Chase Manhattan does.

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.

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.

There's no better policy in a society then pursuing a health and safety of its people.

Gates's net wealth is greater than the combined net worth of the poorest 40% of Americans (112,000,000 people).

There are some people in this world who would never plant a seed because it doesn't produce fruit the first season.

What we have now is democracy without citizens. No one is on the public's side. All the buyers are on the corporations' side. And the bureaucrats in the Administration don't think the government belongs to the people.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

The keys to the gate to those tens of millions of Americans are held by the very two parties that small parties are trying to challenge. Never again should we allow this to happen. The choice for the American people should not be between the bad Democrats and worse Republicans.