You should not allow yourself the luxuries of discouragement of despair. Bounce back immediately, and welcome the adversity because it produces harder thinking and harder drive to get to the objective.
Ralph NaderRead
Ours is a system of corporate socialism, where companies capitalize their profits and socialize their losses…in effect, they tax you for their accidents, bungling, boondoggles, and mismanagement, just like a government. We should be able to deselect them.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote criticizes corporate practices that allow companies to profit while passing the financial burdens of their failures onto the public.
Ralph Nader's quote reflects a sharp critique of the relationship between corporations and the public sphere, suggesting that the current economic system allows companies to make profits while externalizing their losses to society. This dynamic creates a scenario akin to taxation, where citizens bear the costs of corporate mismanagement and failures. Nader advocates for the power of the public to hold corporations accountable, hinting at a need for reform that ensures greater corporate responsibility and transparency.
Themes
CorporateSocialismProfitsLossesAccountabilityPublicManagement
In practice
Example use cases
During a speech on corporate accountability, I referenced Nader's quote to emphasize the necessity of reforming how businesses operate.
More from Ralph Nader
All quotes →I once said to my father, when I was a boy, 'Dad we need a third political party.' He said to me, 'I'll settle for a second.'
Ralph NaderRead
Power concedes nothing without a demand. The struggle for justice must never be adjourned. The forces of injustice do not take vacations.
Ralph NaderRead
The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.
Ralph NaderRead
We have the most prolonged adolescence in the history of mankind. There is no other society that requires so many years to pass before people are grown up ... Adolescence is nurtured and prolonged by educational processes and by industry that has found a bonanza in embracing the adolescent population and fortifying 'adolescent values.' This prolongation of adolescence robs the country of the population group having the most risk takers, and the highest ideals.
Ralph NaderRead
Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity.
Ralph NaderRead
Similar quotes
A politics that is not sensitive to the concerns and circumstances of people's lives, a politics that does not speak to and include people, is an intellectually arrogant politics that deserves to fail.
Paul WellstoneRead
Where free unions and collective bargaining are forbidden, freedom is lost.
Ronald ReaganRead
I'm highly political. I spend an awful lot of time in the U.S. trying to influence decision-makers. But I don't feel in tune with British politics.
Jane GoodallRead
The Cold War did end in the victory of one side and in the defeat of the other. This reality cannot be denied, despite the understandable sensitivities that such a conclusion provokes among the tenderhearted in the West and some of the former leaders of the defeated side.
Zbigniew BrzezinskiRead
[Y]ou will understand the game behind the curtain too well not to perceive the old trick of turning every contingency into a resource for accumulating force in the government.
James MadisonRead
Wherever despotism abounds, the sources of public information are the first to be brought under its control.
Calvin CoolidgeRead