Ralph Nader Quotes

Yet we didn't fix anything. Our roads are bad, our bridges are bad, our tunnels are bad, our schools are bad, our hospitals are bad.

When you travel across America, when you take the trains and drive on its roads, when you visit cities in the middle of the country, the dismal—even rotting—state of American infrastructure is surprising.

Public infrastructure around the world is facing unprecedented stress, with hurricanes, cyclones, floods and forest fires all increasing in frequency and intensity. It's easy to imagine a future in which growing numbers of cities have their frail and long-neglected infrastructures knocked out by disasters and then are left to rot, their core services never repaired or rehabilitated.

Every day in Pittsburgh five million people travel across bridges that either need to be replaced or undergo major repairs.

I say we have not even had the decency to maintain the assets that our parents and grandparents built for us - our roads, our bridges, our wastewater systems, our sewer systems; by the way, those weren't Bolsheviks, those weren't socialists that built those things for us - much less build the infrastructure we need for the 21st century.

When I was growing up, we used to play basketball in a park that was never shoveled when it snowed. The basketball rims were never fixed. And we understood then that there was a relationship between public policy and our quality of life.

Everyone moans about the collapsing U.S. infrastructure.

You can go to any city in America and see roads and bridges that need to be fixed…. I would not call them unsafe … they are dangerous…. The best highway system in the world is falling apart.

It should not be a favor to provide a kindergarten to a community, nor a playground. To win hearts and minds — you are not going to buy that with a soccer field, for goodness sake. This should go without saying.

We are a debtor nation, our airports are third world, our highways are falling apart. Our roads, our bridges, everything, we're like third world.

It's all right. You guys in New York City can't get a hole in the ground fixed, and it's five years later, so let's be fair.

In America, we have an infrastructure that's so bad, our roads, our highways, our schools, our tunnels, our bridges. Look at our bridges. Half of them have reports that they are in serious danger.

Many, many large cities have old, crumbling infrastructure that have got to be dealt with in the nearest future, or they're going to be in serious trouble. They'll be unlivable if they don't do something.

If the roads are in trouble, if bridges are in trouble, and if schools are in trouble, it's because somebody in Washington wanted to pay for something else.

Tax reduction has an almost irresistible appeal to the politician, and it is no doubt also gratifying to the citizen. It means more dollars in his pocket, dollars that he can spend if inflation doesn't consume them first. But dollars in his pocket won't buy him clean streets or an adequate police force or good schools or clean air and water. Handing money back to the private sector in tax cuts and starving the public sector is a formula for producing richer and richer consumers in filthier and filthier communities. If we stick to that formula we shall end up in affluent misery.

Let's take the money that we've been spending on war over the last decade to rebuild America, roads, bridges schools. We do those things, not only is your future going to be bright but America's future is going to bright as well.

The opportunities, income, schools facilities, the basic income support that the government provides or any of these things .. public transport arrangements we have.. all these are part of the way our lives and freedoms are effected.

Three hundred bridges become structurally deficient each year in the state of Pennsylvania. That's one percent added to the already 23 percent they already have. They just can't fix them fast enough.

There's no question that in my lifetime, the contrast between what I called private affluence and public squalor has become very much greater. What do we worry about? We worry about our schools. We worry about our public recreational facilities. We worry about our law enforcement and our public housing. All of the things that bear upon our standard of living are in the public sector.

My idea of government support was, you supply me with hospitals, schools and the environment to do well and that will do me fine. But do not poke your nose in my business.

We think that's necessary just as a foundation for economic growth. It's not the jobs in and of themselves, which you do make by building bridges and things like this, but it's the economic growth that comes from having a modern infrastructure that is in dire need of repair.

In America, we've spent trillions of dollars overseas while allowing our own infrastructure to fall into total disrepair and decay.

What I think people should realize is that programs like Social Security, programs like Medicare, programs like the Veterans Administration, programs like your local park and your local library - those are, if you like, socialist programs; they're run by [and] for the public, not to make money. I think in many ways we should expand that concept so that the American people can enjoy the same benefits that people all over the world are currently enjoying.

Of course, no one should be trapped in bad schools or bad neighborhoods. No one. But I think we need to be asking a larger question: How do we change the norm, the larger context that people seem to accept as a given? Are we so thoroughly resigned to what "is" that we cannot even begin a serious conversation about how to create what ought to be?

The failure to invest in our public transportation and public life, I think, is a scandal and a shame, and it should be a national embarrassment.