Love & Passion Quote by Ralph Nader

Nader’s line is a trapdoor: it drops you from polite conversation into the basement where the power actually lives. By comparing “Big Business” to “sex in Victorian England,” he’s not being cute; he’s weaponizing a familiar cultural hypocrisy. Victorians didn’t lack sex, they lacked permission to talk about it honestly. The scandal wasn’t the act, it was the acknowledgment. Nader’s implication is blunt: corporate power operates the same way - omnipresent, organizing daily life, and yet treated as impolite to name in full.

The phrase “big dirty secret” does triple duty. “Big” mirrors “Big Business,” insisting scale is part of the offense. “Dirty” signals both moral contamination and social taboo, suggesting the system is sustained not just by greed but by genteel denial. “Secret” points to complicity: if it’s a secret, people are invested in keeping it one. That’s the subtext Nader wants to sting. He’s not merely accusing CEOs; he’s accusing a culture that accepts the benefits of corporate dominance while acting shocked by its consequences.

Context matters. Nader came up as the consumer-safety crusader who made regulatory capture a mainstream phrase long before it was a cable-news tic. The quote fits his broader project: reframing corporate influence as a public-health issue and a democratic one, not an abstract “market” force. The Victorian analogy also hints at repression breeding dysfunction: when a society refuses to speak plainly about what runs it, it becomes easier for the powerful to keep running it.