I don’t think government has the proper role in forcing a woman to have a child or forcing a woman not to have a child. And we’ve seen that around the world. This is something that should be privately decided with the family, woman, all the other private factors of it, but we should work toward preventing the necessity of abortion. - -Ralph Nader, Meet the Press, May 7, 2000.
They like to talk about women during an election year, but they actually don’t seem to represent that through public policies that consider the long-term health conditions of women and children — whether it is on those basic levels or on the more insidious levels, the levels of the militarization of the society, violence against women, the chemicals that are in our ground water and in the air now. --Winona LaDuke, LaDuking It Out, Daily Special, Friday, June 16, 2000.
When Americans go to work . . . wondering who will take care of their elderly parents or their children . . . aghast at how little time your frenzied life leaves you for children, family, friends and community, overcome by the sheer ugliness of commercial strips and sprawls and incessantly saturating advertisements, repelled by the voyeurism of the mass media and the commercialization of childhood, upset at the rejection of the wisdoms of our elders and forebears, anxious over the ways your tax dollars are being misused, feeling that there needs to be more to life than the desperate rat race to make ends meet, then think about becoming a part of a progressive movement of Greens, of this citizens' campaign, to change the political economy so that healthy environments, healthy communities, and healthy people become its overwhelming reason for being.--Ralph Nader, Greens acceptance speech, 2000
Do we want our own media, our own television, radio and cable networks as a functioning and deliberative democracy desires and needs? Do we want to reserve part of the public airwaves which the people own in the first place for programming that reflects our solutions, our cultures, our sense of the heroic and the many models of little known success that need to be publicized and emulated?--Ralph Nader, Greens acceptance speech, 2000
Do we wish to lift the horizons of the pursuit of happiness in our society through the pursuits of justice so that bigotry, discrimination and virulent intolerance recedes toward oblivion?--Ralph Nader, Greens acceptance speech, 2000
One of those critical responsibilities is to ensure that our children are well cared for. This is an enormous undertaking because our children are now exposed to the most intense marketing onslaught in history. From the age of 9 months to 19, years precise corporate selling is beamed directly to children separating them from their parents, an unheard of practice formerly, and teaching them how to nag their beleaguered parents as unpaid salesman for companies. There is a bombardment of their impressionable minds.--Ralph Nader, Greens acceptance speech, 2000
Through television, the Internet stores, samples and mailings, these companies convey their message to the little ones. They teach them how to crave junk food, thrill to violent and pornographic programming, interact with the virtual reality mayhem. The marketeers are keenly aware of the stages of child psychologies, age by age, and know how to turn many into Pavlovian specimens powered by spasmodically shortened attention spans as they become ever more remote from their own family.--Ralph Nader, Greens acceptance speech, 2000
Green goals aim at preserving the commonwealth of assets that the people of the United States already own so that the people, not big business, control what they own, and using these vast resources of the public lands, the public airwaves and trillions of worker pension dollars to achieve healthier environments, healthier communities and healthier people.--Ralph Nader, Greens acceptance speech, 2000
Soundbites that others have said about Nader that we like:
We've had 8 years of Democrats acting like Republicans. Now we get 4 days of Republicans talking like Democrats. No wonder so many people are voting for Ralph Nader.--Casey Peters
My mother told me several years ago that when Nader was on Phil Donahue, someone asked him why he never got married. Nader joked that he's married to General Motors but later got serious and said, "Because I'm very dedicated to my vocation and it wouldn't be fair to dump the child care on someone else." Nader then got a standing ovation.--Kathleen Trigiani
