177 Quotes by Robert B. Reich

It turns out that what money buys has rapidly diminishing emotional returns ... As long as we're not destitute, happiness depends less on getting what we want than appreciating what we already have.

The system is created by people. The question is, 'Which people?' The central issue is not more or less government. It’s 'Who is government for?'. In other words, it’s all a question of power — who has it and who doesn’t.

When Republicans recently charged the President with promoting 'class warfare,' he answered it was 'just math.' But it's more than math. It's a matter of morality.Republicans have posed the deepest moral question of any society: whether we're all in it together. Their answer is we're not.President Obama should proclaim, loudly and clearly, we are.

The most important political competition over the next decades will not be between the right and left or between Republicans and Democrats. It will be between a majority of Americans who have been losing ground and an economic elite that refuses to recognize or respond to the majority’s growing distress.

We are born, we grow up, we live our lives as best we can. If we are thoughtful we are good parents and good partners. If we are wise we strive for integrity and intimacy. If we are fortunate we discover love and joy. If we are able, we make the world a little better than we found it. That is all there is for any of us.

Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?

We “bowl alone,” as sociologist Robert Putnam has put it. Yet this fails to account for a monumental shift in whom we join and for what. We still join together, but now we join for services too expensive to purchase alone—child care, the schools our children attend, recreational facilities, and security...

If nothing is done to counter present trends, the major fault line in American politics will no longer be between Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. It will be between the "establishment"--political insiders, power brokers, the heads of American business, Wall Street, and the mainstream media--and an increasingly mad-as-hell populace determined to "take back America" from them.

Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.