8 Quotes & Sayings By Kalle Lasn

Kalle Lasn was born in Stockholm, Sweden. His book The Culture of Make Believe was published to considerable controversy in 1989, and drew international attention to the issue of globalization and its consequences for disappearing indigenous cultures. His work is distinguished by its originality, imagination, and clarity, and has garnered critical acclaim from writers, artists, scientists, philosophers, journalists, and activists. He is the author of five books: The Culture of Make Believe (1989), The Art of Destruction (1993), Exposing Falsehoods (2004), The Global Brain (2006) and Culture Jam (2008) Read more

Kalle Lasn lives in New York City with his wife Elisabeth.

1
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
2
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
3
In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth. Kalle Lasn
4
The global economy is a doomsday machine that must be stopped and reprogrammed. Kalle Lasn
5
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
6
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
7
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