Kalle Lasn Quotes

Canada, Film Maker
March 24, 1942

Kalle Lasn (born March 24, 1942) is an Estonian-Canadian film maker, author, magazine editor, and activist. Near the end of World War II, his family fled Estonia and Lasn spent some time in a German refugee camp. At age seven he was resettled in Australia with his family, where he grew up and remained until the late 1960s, attending school in Canberra. In the late 1960's, he founded a market research company in Tokyo, and in 1970, moved to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. Over the course of twenty years, he produced documentaries for PBS and Canada’s National Film Board. He currently resides in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Also known as Author, Activist, Editor

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

Kalle Lasn
- Time
- History
- Mother
In the global marketplace of the future the price of every product will tell the ecological truth.

Kalle Lasn
- Truth
- Future
- Products

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

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
- People
- World
- Money
I believe that one of the most powerful things of all is aesthetics.

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
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
- Control
- Fiction
- Rights
I want to live in a world where human beings, not corporate entities, create the future.

Kalle Lasn
- World
- Live
- Future

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
- Water
- Environment
- Air
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
- World
- Great
- American
The commercial media are to the mental environment what factories are to the physical environment

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

Kalle Lasn
- World
- Powerful
- Promise
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
- Night
- Honest
- Coins
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
- Death
- Economy
- Break