Ralph Nader Quotes

When people start to complain, "Voting doesn't matter," I'm like, the people of Wisconsin weren't boycotting and hitting the streets and blowing up those rooms because voting didn't change those situations for them. That was their livelihood. There's revolution going on all over the world because they actually can't have a voice.

This right to vote is the basic right without which all others are meaningless. It gives people, people as individuals, control over their own destinies.

Popular suffrage is in itself no guarantee of freedom. People can vote themselves into slavery.

People are discouraged from voting and part of what is important for Latino citizens is to make your voice heard, because you're not just speaking for yourself. You're speaking for family members, friends, classmates of yours in school.

There are very significant ways around America on how to break its grip, which is, of course, a way to exclude dissenting voices before tens of millions of people.

It is one thing being able to contest an election and to give the people hope that I can be the next prime minister. It is a totally different situation where the people of Pakistan are told that the results are already taken and the leader of your choice is banned.

People have been voting to choose their leader but their votes were never allowed to COUNT, I will not allow the choice of the people to be subverted by any party, not even APC

The Christian Democrats always made you feel like the poor relation.

Political discussions fly over the heads of those who have no votes, and are not endeavoring to acquire them.

To me, it's a different kind of voter suppression to constantly try to make people feel like the election is over before it's even begun.

The people we need to hear from most are the ones who make themselves heard least - except, of course, on Election Day.

It is a travesty for anyone who is elected to office, who serves in an elective office, to engage in voter suppression.

In a democracy, a person's vote is their voice. For much of our history, however, not everyone's voice was welcome at the voting booth.

Making it harder for the most vulnerable voters to participate in the political process inevitably leads to policies and policymakers that do not represent the interests of all people.

If people of colour do not exercise their democratic right to vote, they will remain an invisible, voiceless, and largely ignored part of the electorate.

You can get elected to Congress without ever talking to black voters at all, and I think that's bad for the party.

Millions of people in many so-called democratic countries have lost the right to vote, or never obtain it. And millions clearly feel that the political mainstream is not articulating a vocabulary or policies oriented to their needs and aspirations.

I didn't have a voice or a vote at Madrid.

It's tremendously undemocratic in a democratic society when you deliberately disenfranchise thousands of people.

Leaving Europe in my mind wasn't the best thing; it's not the best way of having that political voice. But that's the only voice people in Britain could have. People turned out in their droves to vote, more than for prime minister. So it was huge and very divisive.

I am not running for mayor yet. But if it comes to be true that people cannot voice an opinion unless they have been elected, then we are no longer in a democracy.

There's people on the left who say, the ballot box is a waste of time. Forget them. When Mandela voted for the first time at the age of 76 there was a lot of grown men, including me, wept buckets. That was what it was about. It doesn't solve things, but it gives you the mechanism to hold to account the people with power.

I spent many years working for voting rights, but we still see sophisticated efforts, led by white officials, to disenfranchise black voters in local and national elections.

What words can express her [the white woman’s] humiliation when, at the close of this long conflict, the government which she had served so faithfully held her unworthy of a voice in its councils, while it recognized as the political superiors of all the noble women of the nation the negro men just emerged from slavery, and not only totally illiterate, but also densely ignorant of every public question.

We desire to give the Soviet people absolute liberty of voting for those they desire to elect, those whom they trust to ensure their interests.