Naomi Klein

"It Can Raise an Army of Supporters"

"It Will Build New Alliances-and Undercut the Right"

"We Were Born for This Moment"

"That bleak view of humanity--that we are nothing more than a collection of atomized individuals and nuclear families, unable to do anything of value together except wage war-has had a stranglehold over the public imagination for a very long time. No wonder so many of us believed we could never rise to the climate challenge. But more than thirty years later, as surely as the glaciers are melting and the ice sheets are breaking apart, that "free-market" ideology is dissolving, too. In its place, a new vision of what humanity can be is emerging. It is coming from the streets, from the schools, from workplaces, and even from inside houses of government. It's a vision that says that all of us, combined, make up the fabric of society. And when the future of life is at stake, there is nothing we cannot achieve."

"Here is my attempt to decipher the chaos of doppelganger culture, with its maze of simulated selves and digital avatars and mass surveillance and racial and ethnic projections and fascist doubles and the studiously denied shadows that are all coming to the surface at once. It's going to take some wild turns-but rest assured that the point of this mapping is not to stay trapped inside the house of mirrors, but to do what I sense many of us long to do: escape its mind-bending confines and find our way toward some kind of collective power and purpose. The point is to make our way out of this collective vertigo, and get somewhere distinctly better, together. (from the Introduction)"

"Vertigo invades when the world we thought we knew no longer holds. The known world is crumbling. That's okay. It was an edifice stitched together with denial and disavowal, with unseeing and unknowing, with mirrors and shadows. It needed to crash. Now, in the rubble, we can make something more reliable, more worthy of our trust, more able to survive the coming shocks. (chapter 15, p342)"

"If there is anything this journey has taught that identity is not fixed. Not mine. Not Wolf's. Not even the barrier between our two identities. It's all fluid, shifting around and doubling constantly. Negotiating that doubling-between our younger selves and our older selves, between our public selves and our private selves, between our living selves and our dying selves-is a part of what it means to be human. A bigger part of being human, though, and certainly of living a good life, is not about how we make ourselves in those shifting sands of self. It's about what we make together. (from the Epilogue)"

"A critically important thought-leader in these perilous times, a necessary voice as a courageous movement of movements rises from the ashes."

"The greatest theorist of climate change."

"that’s something that Naomi Klein talks about a lot, is how we are sort of in this moment where imagination is one of the most valuable things we can bring to the table. And a failure of imagination means a failure of the spectrum of futures that are available to us. And I just, I like to think of — so I remind myself and others that there is still such a wide spectrum of possible futures, and we do get some choice in which ones we have."

"Journalist Naomi Klein notes, "every time I log on to activist news sites like Indymedia.org, which practice 'open publishing,' I'm confronted with a string of Jewish conspiracy theories about 9/11 and excerpts from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion," the tired old forgery from tsarist Russia that purported to represent the Zionist plot to take over the world."

"At the conference itself [Copenhagen 2009], she became an important voice for the NGOs shut out of the negotiating sessions, and made a convincing case that there was little chance of solving global warming in isolation from the other problems of power and poverty plaguing the globe."

"In a conclusion that the creators of South Park must have forced on her, Klein finds that the most authentic answers to our current troubles lie in the wisdom of Sioux tribes. The leftist trope of the "noble savage" whose Edenic insights must shame the civilisation that has usurped them stretches back at least as far as Rousseau. Yet many of these insights are to philosophy what panpipes are to music. Klein quotes LaDonna Brave Bull Allard who laughingly says that the grandkids "can't believe how little some of the white people know. They come running: 'Grandma! The white people don't know how to chop wood! Can we teach them?' I say, 'Yes, teach them.'" If you dream that the future of humanity might constitute more than wood-chopping, then you're probably a racist and Klein has little time and littler consolation for you. On another occasion an evidently awestruck Klein relays some native Sioux wisdom, viz: "There are things that are more important than money." Who knew? The aperçus of Klein's school of thought would be shamed by the school of Hallmark Cards."

"I count her among the most inspirational political thinkers in the world today."

"We attend the first Hawai'i screening of Naomi Klein's documentary at the mall movie theatre. The line for the documentary is long, almost as long as the Hawai'i endangered species list. Unlike the endangered species list, there aren't many natives in this line...When the natives in "This Changes Everything" cry, the white people in the theatre cry "white tears" extra-loudly. I hate it when white people cry extra-loudly, as if they've never seen native people cry in real life. When the documentary shows polluted native lands, the white people gasp extra-loudly. I hate it when white people gasp extra-loudly. "Stop gasping so loudly!" I shout in my head. "Everything already changed for native peoples centuries ago!" We sneak out of the theatre during the post-documentary discussion. I whisper to my wife: "The Geological Society should refer to this era of human destruction as the Wypipocene." She says we should make a documentary about how climate change is finally making white people uncomfortable. Titled: "Melting Glaciers, White Tears.""

"Naomi Klein's work has always moved and guided me. She is the great chronicler of our age of climate emergency, an inspirer of generations."