177 Quotes by Robert B. Reich

America’s original sin was not the exclusion of people born outside the nation’s borders from citizenship. It was the exclusion of many people who had lived here even before the start of the Republic – in particular, Native Americans and African Americans. For most of its existence, America found it relatively easy to assimilate foreigners, although there were periods of sharp and even violent tension.

Averages don’t always reveal the most telling realities. You know, Shaquille O’Neal and I have an average height of 6 feet.

It is no great feat for an economy to create a large number of very-low-wage jobs. Slavery, after all, was a full employment system.

Leadership must entail trusteeship. Leaders are stewards of the unwritten rules we once took for granted, that constituted the common good.

I wish it were simply a nightmare, but I think that any reasonable person watching American politics would come to the conclusion that a second Bush administration would in fact incorporate a more radicalized version of what we’ve seen in the first administration.

Their aim is to divide and conquer: pit unionized workers against nonunionized, public sector workers against nonpublic, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don’t believe these programs will be there for them, and the middle class against the poor.

I mean, you hear the word ‘globalization’ over and over and over again. Globalization, globalization, globalization. Rarely has a word gone so directly from obscurity to meaninglessness without any intervening period of coherence.

There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.

Today the great divide is not between left and right. It’s between democracy and oligarchy.