Ralph Nader Quotes

We can get carried away with our heads in books, and although there's so much to be learned from that, I think sitting in a cafe and speaking with someone - whatever it is, their mannerisms, their choices, are just as valuable as any class you can go to.

I have a grandson who is 20. He's a computer guy. I'm worried that he can't communicate without his machine. They have no personal contact with people. That's the bad part of technology.

When I got my first television set, I stopped caring so much about having close relationships.

Viewers can't work or play while watching television; they can't read; they can't be out on the streets, falling in love with the wrong people, learning how to quarrel and compromise with other human beings. In short, they are asocial.

Computers and smart devices are among the greatest intellectual gifts ever created for man but, if not balanced with human contact, may offer little to develop one's heart.

People en masse have lost the ability to go out there and meet people in real life.

I realize how myself and other people have started to almost fool ourselves that it's more important to us and more real than the real world, the offline world, and we value looking at our phone and pixels on a screen more than connecting eye to eye with a human being, which is terrifying to me because we're becoming robots.

I'm not particularly interested in my phone. I'm interested in human contact. I think phones have created a certain social incapacity; it's made people socially deficient.

Technology is fine. . ., but that popular vision of the future, where you plug somebody in and leave them there and they don't get out and interact with actual flesh-and-blood humans - you know the answer before I say it - that's not good.

Basically, I wasn't properly socialized, so it made sense to do physics.

Social media puts us inside our phones and our computers and our headphones, and we're not connecting so much with our outside environment. Even when people go to the Grand Canyon they're more concerned about the selfies than actually looking at the canyon. I see it with my own kids - the addiction to needing things fast, never pausing to just see what's around us and connect with our fellow human beings in real time.

Some people fear that technology will become more engaging than live human interactions. That's silly; technology is already way more interesting than other people.

I never go out, ever. And I think that's why I've been craving human connection so badly, and in a way, I'm excited to go on tour to be around people all the time.

All real living is meeting.

The consumer culture in general has washed over our civilization. For the last 50 years, if you've had a credit card and some access to money, you don't really need neighbors around you. And as a result, they dwindled. The average American has half as many close friends as they did in 1950. Three quarters of Americans don't know their next-door neighbor. They may know their name, but they have no real relationship with them. That's an utterly new place for human beings to find themselves in - I mean, we're a socially evolved primate.

some may think that to affirm dialogue—the encounter of women and men in the world in order to transform the world—is naively and subjectively idealistic. there is nothing, however, more real or concrete than people in the world and with the world, than humans with other humans.

Sometimes, the loneliness probably got to be too much and anyone seemed better than no one.

Thanks to the greatly improved possibility of communication, we overrate its importance. Even stronger, we underrate the importance of isolation.

Physician Albert Scheweitzer said. " We are all so much together, but we are all dying of loneliness." Professor Leo Buscaglia notes, "There seems to be accumulating evidence that there is actually an inborn need for this togetherness, this human interaction, this love. It seems that without these close ties with other human beings, a new born infant, for example, can regress developmentally, lose consciousness, fall into idiocy and die.

We are imprisoned in life in the company of persons powerfully unlike us.

If we evolved a race of Isaac Newtons, that would not be progress. For the price Newton had to pay for being a supreme intellect was that he was incapable of friendship, love, fatherhood, and many other desirable things. As a man he was a failure; as a monster he was superb.

That's how I try to think of education - a school is a miniature society where children learn to function in a real world.

The kind of relatedness to the world may be noble or trivial, but even being related to the basest kind of pattern is immensely preferable to being alone.

Perhaps the facts most astounding and most real are never communicated by man to man.

I think that one of the things about music is it's supposed to be spontaneous, it's supposed to be real human beings bouncing off of each other whether its from the stage or to the audience, or jamming with friends.