177 Quotes by Robert B. Reich

If you ever want to get a sense of your own personal failure, look at yourself trying to get across a point that nobody is listening to and the situation gets worse and worse.

I knew Hillary Clinton from undergraduate days and was enormously impressed with her. She was a terrific energy and enthusiasm, and a great organizer. And I knew that she was going to have a political future.

Few ideas have more profoundly poisoned the minds of more people than the notion of a “free market” existing somewhere in the universe, into which government “intrudes.

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...

What we have lost, I think, is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals – the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.

Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn’t even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.

For three decades almost all the gains from economic growth have gone to the top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 9–10 percent of our total income. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had more than doubled, to 23.5 percent. Over the same period the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent tripled its share. We haven’t experienced this degree of concentrated wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.

But in modern America we often shame the wrong people. Instead of deterring behavior that undermines the common good, shame is too often deployed against people who don’t fit in – to ostracize them even further.

As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for a different government – often one that favors them or their patrons.1.