Naomi Klein Quotes

Now and then, someone is able to look at an empty space, conclude it would be a great place to start a revolution, and bravely go forward.

Passive fatalism can never be the role of a revolutionary party, like the Social Democracy.

Revolutions are the locomotives of history. Drive them full speed ahead and keep them on the rails... .

Who, if not the revolutionary intelligentsia, could promote the political development of the working class?

Grasp Revolution

None of us is designed for the role we must assume in a revolutionary society, although Cubans had the privilege of Jose Marti's example.

Today we are fighting Communism. Okay. If I'd been alive fifty years ago, the brand of Conservatism we have today would have been damn near called Communism and we should have been told to go and fight that. History is moving pretty quickly these days and the heroes and villains keep on changing parts.

No political party can possibly lead a great revolutionary movement to victory unless it possesses revolutionary theory and knowledge of history and has a profound grasp of the practical movement.

I think we have to talk about educating the people for critical consciousness about what anarchy is.

Return to Shaoshan I regret the passing, the dying, of the vague dream: my native orchards thirty-two years ago. Yet red banners roused the serfs, who seized three-pronged lances when the warlords raised whips in their black hands. We were brave and sacrifice was easy and we asked the sun, the moon, to alter the sky. Now I see a thousand waves of beans and rice and am happy. In the evening haze heroes are coming home.

The spirit of democracy... requires change of the heart... requires the inculcation of the spirit of brotherhood.

It is probable that democracy owes more to nonconformity than to any other single movement.

The whole modern world has divided itself into Conservatives and Progressives. The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected.

Fidel Castro gave it all to make his nation serviceable to all who desire real change. That's why I love Fidel Castro, and that's why he will never die.

My biggest dream in the world is for everyone to become vegetarian, so there won't be any more suffering.

I cannot too often repeat that Democracy is a word the real gist of which still sleeps, quite unawakened, notwithstanding the resonance and the many angry tempests out of which its syllables have come, from pen or tongue. It is a great word, whose history, I suppose, remains unwritten because that history has yet to be enacted.

Justice is a dream. But it is a dream that we are determined to realize.

There was a generation of kids who were just kind of emulating distant heroes and wearing peace symbols, and parents who were thinking of themselves as liberal and removed from barbarity, but it also was the era of Vietnam. I very much was influenced - and I think the whole country was kind of in a state of shock - for the first time seeing the horror and cruelty of war.

I have come to believe, deeply and firmly, that we can create a poverty free world if we want to. I came to this conclusion not as a product of a pious dream, but as a concrete result of experience gained in the work of the Grameen Bank.

History is made by masses of people. One man, or ten men, don't start the earthquakes and don't stop them either. Only hero worshipers and ignorant historians think they do.

It is the artists of the world, the feelers and the thinkers who will ultimately save us; who can articulate, educate, defy, insist, sing and shout the big dreams.

We need a new political science for a new world.

We have all in some degree become anarchistic.

I think a hero is any person really intent on making this a better place for all people.

Harry Belafonte hit me to the Dream Defenders and I liked what they were about. When I asked them how I could help their movement, they said, "You can help by coming down here; you can tweet."