Ralph Nader

“Your best teacher is your last mistake.”

“A society with more justice needs less charity.”

“Moral courage is the highest expression of humanity ...”

“Members of Congress are like the voters in one respect -- they want to go with the winners.”

“There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.”

“Let it not be said by a future, forlorn generation that we wasted and lost our great potential because our despair was so deep we didn't even try, or because each of us thought someone else was worrying about our problems.”

“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.”

“Since I was a law student, I have been against the death penalty. It does not deter. It is severely discriminatory against minorities, especially since they're given no competent legal counsel defense in many cases. It's a system that has to be perfect. You cannot execute one innocent person. No system is perfect. And to top it off, for those of you who are interested in the economics it, it costs more to pursue a capital case toward execution than it does to have full life imprisonment without parole”

“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. ”

“As a public interest lawyer, your fund of injustice will never be empty.”

“A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.”

“The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.”