Notable Peace & Justice Activists Posters “N...-”
with curriculum enrichment resources for social studies classrooms, teachers, home schoolers, offices.

Ralph Nader
Fridtjof Nansen
Carrie Nation

Scott & Helen Nearing
Ada Negri
Martin Niemoller

Ralph Nader
b. 2-27-1934; Winsted, Connecticut

Author, lecturer, and attorney Ralph Nader is best known for his political activism in consumer protection, humanitarianism, environmentalism, and democratic government.

• Ralph Nader quotes ~
• “The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.”
• “The function of leadership is to produce more leaders, not more followers.”
• “There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.”
• “When strangers start acting like neighbors... communities are reinvigorated.”
• “A society that has more justice is a society that needs less charity.”
• “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 dis-elect them.”
• “Today the large organization is lord and master, and most of its employees have been desensitized much as were the medieval peasants who never knew they were serfs.”
• “A seller-sovereign economy includes sellers who are monopolistic or oligopolistic without being confronted by the ultimate consumers who are organized in monopsonistic or ologopsonistic modes. It is an economy where enormous skill, artifice, and resources are used in getting consumers to buy what the sellers want to sell, notwithstanding the availability of more efficient, safe, economical, durable, and effective alternatives, including that of buying nothing at all.”
• “The corporate lobby in Washington is basically designed to stifle all legislative activity on behalf of consumers.”
• “Once you don't vote your ideals ... that has serious undermining affects. It erodes the moral basis of our democracy.”
• “Sanctions against polluters are feeble and out of date, and are rarely invoked.”

• Ralph Nader books

Fridtjof Nansen
b. 10-10-1861; Store Froen, Norway
d. 5-13-1930

Fridtjof Nansen was a Norwegian polar explorer, zoologist and diplomat who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1922 for his work as a League of Nations High Commissioner. The ‘Nansen bottle’ is still used today to collect deep water samples and the UNHRC presents the "Nansen Refuge Award" yearly.

FYI ~ Nansen's first wife was Eva Sars, noted as a mezzosoprano and pioneer in women's skiing.

• Farthest North: The Exploration of the Fram 1893-1896

Carrie A. Nation
b. 11-25-1846; Garrard County, Kentucky
d. 6-9-1911; Leavenworth, Kansas

Carrie Nation, née Moore, was a leader in the temperance movement, starting a chapter of the Women's Christian Temperance Union in Medicine Lodge, Kansas. She was known for smashing the stock of saloons with rocks and finally a hatchet. She is buried in Belton, Missouri.

Carrie A. Nation quotes:
• “Men are nicotine-soaked, beer-besmirched, whiskey-greased, red-eyed devils.”
• “I felt invincible. My strength was that of a giant. God was certainly standing by me. I smashed five saloons with rocks before I ever took a hatchet.”

Helen and Scott Nearing

Back-to-landers Helen (1904-1995) and Scott (1883-1983) wrote extensively about their experience living what they termed “the good life”. They approached life by reducing their wants and engaging in a mostly barter exchange for their organic produce and other sorts of labor.

Scott Nearing had been a professor, dismissed for his socialist views in 1915.

Ada Negri
b. 2-3-1870; Lodi, Italy
d. 1-11-1945; Milan

Ada Negri was a village school teacher, a poet and the first woman to be admitted to the Italian Academy (1940). She also published political, mystical and feminist works.

Martin Niemoller Giclee Print

First They Came For ... Poster

Martin Niemoller
b. 1-14-1892; Lippstadt, Germany
d. 3-6-1984; Wiesbaden, Germany

Theologian and Lutheran pastor Martin Niemoller is best remembered as the author of -

They came first for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Alfred Nobel
b. 10-21-1833; Stockholm, Sweden
d. 12-10-1896; Sanremo, Italy

Chemist, engineer, innovator, and armaments manufacturer Alfred Nobel was the inventor of dynamite. He held 355 different patents and used his enormous fortune to institute the Nobel Prizes. The synthetic element nobelium (No, atomic number 102) was named after him.

• Alfred Nobel: Inventive Thinker

Caroline Norton (née Sheridan)
b. 3-22-1808; London, England
d. 6-15-1877

Caroline Norton, famous British society beauty, feminist and author of the early and mid nineteenth century, wrote both to support herself and bring attention to granting rights to married and divorced women, as a result of her unsuccessful marriage.

Norton was the grand-daughter of playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan.

• Caroline Norton's Defense
• Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap-Book: 1849 by Caroline E. S. Norton

Charles Eliot Norton
b. 11-16-1827; Cambridge, MA
d. 10-21-1908

Author, social critic and professor of history of art, Charles Eliot Norton, was considered to be the most cultivated man in the United States by many of his contemporaries. The Charles Eliot Norton Lecture Professorship of Poetry at Harvard University was established in 1925 as an annual lectureship in “poetry in the broadest sense”.

Charles Eliot Norton quotes ~
• “If a war be undertaken... before the resources of peace have been tried and proved vain to secure it, that war has no defense, it is a national crime.”
• “The voice of protest, of warning, of appeal is never more needed than when the clamor of fife and drum, echoed by the press and too often by the pulpit, is bidding all men fall in step and obey in silence the tyrannous word of command. Then, more than ever, it is the duty of the good citizen not to be silent.”

• Charles Eliot Norton: The Art of Reform in Nineteenth-Century America

John Humphrey Noyes
b. 9-3-1811; Brattleboro, VT
d. 4-13-1886; Niagara Falls, Ontario

Utopian socialist John Humphrey Noyes, who coined the term "free love", founded the Oneida Community in upstate New York in 1848. The community formally dissolved and converted to a joint stock company on January 1, 1881.

He held the theological idea of “Perfection” — that it was possible to be free of sin in this lifetime — caused his friends to think him unbalanced, and he began to be called a heretic by his own professors. From the moment of his conversion Noyes maintained that, because he had surrendered his will to God, everything he chose to do was perfect because his choices “came from a perfect heart”.

FYI - a Utopian socialism is based in idealism, rather than materialism, and is generally dismissed as unrealistic.