Kalle Lasn Quotes & Sayings

An increasing number of people are growing uncomfortable with the gulf between the world's rich and the poor. Ostentatiously splashing your money around simply draws attention to that disparity, and to your own position on the lucky higher ground. It suggests a callousness, an inhumanity, a let's-just-rub-their-noses-in-it arrogance. — Kalle Lasn

I want to live in a world where human beings, not corporate entities, create the future. — Kalle Lasn

Do an overwhelming number of respected scientists believe that human actions are changing the Earth's climate? Yes. OK, that being the case, let's undermine that by finding and funding those few contrarians who believe otherwise. Promote their message widely and it will accumulate in the mental environment, just as toxic mercury accumulates in a biological ecosystem. Once enough of the toxin has been dispersed, the balance of public understanding will shift. Fund a low level campaign to suggest any threat to the car is an attack on personal freedoms. Create a "grassroots" group to defend the right to drive. Portray anticar activists as prudes who long for the days of the horse and buggy. Then sit back, watch the infotoxins spread - and get ready to sell bigger, better cars for years to come. — Kalle Lasn

A meme (rhymes with dream) is a unit of information (a catchphrase, a concept, a tune, a notion of fashion, philosophy or politics) that leaps from brain to brain. Memes compete with one another for replication, and are passed down through a population much the same way genes pass through a species. Potent memes can change minds, alter behavior, catalyze collective mindshifts and transform cultures. Which is why meme warfare has become the geopolitical battle of our information age. Whoever has the memes has the power. — Kalle Lasn

There's some idea there, and the power of it comes from the fact that most of the time you'll never be able to answer what it is. It's just there. It's just a magic moment that you can feel in your gut that it's there, and you're willing to go there and sleep there and go through the hardship and fight for it. Once you start answering it too clearly then the magic is gone. — Kalle Lasn

American culture is no longer created by the people ... A free, authentic life is no longer possible in AmericaTM today. We are being manipulated in the most insidious way. Our emotions, personalities and core values are under siege from media and cultural forces too complex to decode. A continuous product message has woven itself into the very fabric of our existence. Most North Americans now live designer lives-sleep, eat, sit in car, work, shop, watch TV, sleep again. I doubt there's more than a handful of free, spontaneous minutes anywhere in that cycle. We ourselves have been branded. — Kalle Lasn

America, the great liberator, is in desperate need of being liberated from itself
from its own excesses and arrogance. And the world needs to be liberated from American values and culture, spreading across the planet as if by divine providence. — Kalle Lasn

The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed. — Kalle Lasn

It's a measure of the depth of our consumer trance that the death of the planet is not sufficient to break it. — Kalle Lasn

I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics. — Kalle Lasn

The most powerful narcotic in the world is the promise of belonging. — Kalle Lasn

In the Soviet Union you weren't allowed to speak out against the government. In the US you cannot speak out against sponsors. — Kalle Lasn

Amming a coin into a monopoly newspaper box or liberating a billboard in the middle of the night can be a rather honest and joyful thing to do. — Kalle Lasn

Our mental environment is a common-property resource like the air or the water. We need to protect ourselves from unwanted incursions into it, much the same way we lobbied for nonsmoking areas ten years ago. — Kalle Lasn

Overconsumption is the mother of all environmental problems. For the first time in the history of capitalism, consumption itself has become controversial. — Kalle Lasn

The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment — Kalle Lasn

Corporations are not legal "persons" with constitutional rights and freedoms of their own, but legal fictions that we created and must therefore control. — Kalle Lasn

We got rich by violating one of the central tenets of economics: thou shall not sell off your capital and call it income. And yet over the past 40 years we have clear-cut the forests, fished rivers and oceans to the brink of extinction and siphoned oil from the earth as if it possessed an infinite supply. We've sold off our planet's natural capital and called it income. And now the earth, like the economy, is stripped. — Kalle Lasn

In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth. — Kalle Lasn