20+ Kalle Lasn Quotes On

Kalle Lasn is a film-maker and cultural activist from Estonia. He is the co-founder and editor-in-chief of Adbusters, a magazine and media platform that promotes anti-consumerism and environmentalism. He is also the director of the documentary films “Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media” and “The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream”. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Kalle Lasn on leadership, love.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All of us somehow felt that the next battleground was going to be culture. We all felt somehow that our culture had been stolen from us-by commercial forces, by advertising agencies, by TV broadcasters. It felt like we were no longer singing our songs and telling stories, and generating our culture from the bottom up, but now we were somehow being spoon-fed this commercial culture top down. — Kalle Lasn

People look at the future and see a black hole. They look at climate change and see an ecological crisis. They look at their leaders corrupted by money and see a political crisis. They wonder if they'll ever be able to pay off their student loan or own a house. Given this ecological, political and financial crisis, what they want is a different future. Their fundamental demand is a different regime to provide that future. — 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 non-smoking areas ten years ago. — Kalle Lasn

People have tried all kinds of ways to fix things, like electing Obama and having a debate about decreasing the power of corporations. Then the Supreme Court gives them personhood with the Citizens United decision. You realize that no matter what you do, who you elect, how wonderful your article is, how eloquently you speak on CNN, none of it will make a difference. Ultimately, the only choice is a revolution that pulls off a soft regime change. — Kalle Lasn

Jamming 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

The story in America was a vibrant, bottoms-up democracy subverted by corporations and financial speculators. Those people now control much of the narrative. They also control the congressmen and the legislation that's passed in Washington. So we felt that America had become a corporate state and soft regime change was necessary. That was the concept that got us excited. Then we started thinking about ways to spark it. — 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

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

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

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

Life Lessons by Kalle Lasn

1. Kalle Lasn's work emphasizes the importance of understanding the underlying causes of social and economic issues in order to create effective solutions.
2. He encourages people to think critically about the world around them and to take action to make a difference.
3. His films also highlight the power of collaboration and collective action to create meaningful change.