Top 252 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Reich
Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American economist Robert Reich.
Last updated on September 16, 2024.
The liberal ideal is that everyone should have fair access and fair opportunity. This is not equality of result. It's equality of opportunity. There's a fundamental difference.
Bankruptcy laws allow companies to smoothly reorganize, but not college graduates burdened by student loans.
Freedom is the one value conservatives place above all others, yet time and again, their ideal of freedom ignores the growing imbalance of power in our society that's eroding the freedoms of most people.
Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms.
Nations are becoming less relevant in a world where everyone and everything is interconnected. The connections that matter most are again becoming more personal.
Sugary drinks are blamed for increasing the rates of chronic disease and obesity in America. Yet efforts to reduce their consumption through taxes or other measures have gone nowhere. The beverage industry has spent millions defeating them.
You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring.
We do not want to live in a theocracy. We should maintain that barrier and government has no business telling someone what they ought to believe or how they should conduct their private lives.
Drug company payments to doctors are a small part of a much larger strategy by Big Pharma to clean our pockets.
America spends a fortune on drugs: more per person than any other nation on earth, even though Americans are no healthier than the citizens of other advanced nations.
Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.
Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together.
We never used to blink at taking a leadership role in the world. And we understood leadership often required something other than drones and bombs. We accepted global leadership not just for humanitarian reasons, but also because it was in our own best interest. We knew we couldn't isolate ourselves from trouble. There was no place to hide.
Average working people need more fresh starts. Big corporations, banks, and Donald Trump need fewer.
America is one of few advanced nations that allow direct advertising of prescription drugs.
What are called 'public schools' in many of America's wealthy communities aren't really 'public' at all. In effect, they're private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.
More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger.
Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them.
As digital equipment replaces the jobs of routine workers and lower-level professionals, technicians are needed to install, monitor, repair, test, and upgrade all the equipment.
Our young people - their capacities to think, understand, investigate, and innovate - are America's future.
It's not government's business what people do in their private bedrooms.
Money buys the most experienced teachers, less-crowded classrooms, high-quality teaching materials, and after-school programs.
The largest party in America, by the way, is neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. It's the party of non-voters.
True patriotism isn't cheap. It's about taking on a fair share of the burden of keeping America going.
Technology is changing so fast that knowledge about specifics can quickly become obsolete. That's why so much of what technicians learn is on the job.
The faith that anyone could move from rags to riches - with enough guts and gumption, hard work and nose to the grindstone - was once at the core of the American Dream.
There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.
News and images move so easily across borders that attitudes and aspirations are no longer especially national. Cyber-weapons, no longer the exclusive province of national governments, can originate in a hacker's garage.
We don't have to sit by and watch our meritocracy be replaced by a permanent aristocracy, and our democracy be undermined by dynastic wealth.
Community colleges are great bargains. They avoid the fancy amenities four-year liberal arts colleges need in order to lure the children of the middle class.
One tax dodge often used by multi-national companies is to squirrel their earnings abroad in foreign subsidiaries located in countries where taxes are lower.
Much of what's called 'public' is increasingly a private good paid for by users - ever-higher tolls on public highways and public bridges, higher tuitions at so-called public universities, higher admission fees at public parks and public museums.
Media outlets that are exploiting Ebola because they want a sensational story and politicians using it to their own ends ought to be ashamed.
Standing up to bullies is the hallmark of a civilized society.
To get back to the kind of shared prosperity and upward mobility we once considered normal will require another era of fundamental reform, of both our economy and our democracy.
Too many young people graduate laden with debts that take years, if not decades, to pay off.
The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.
Our moral authority is as important, if not more important, than our troop strength or our high-tech weapons. We are rapidly losing that moral authority, not only in the Arab world but all over the world.
The job creators are members of America's vast middle class and the poor, whose purchases cause businesses to expand and invest.
A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important.
Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.
As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.
Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown Detroit, you wouldn't know exactly when you left the city and crossed over into Oakland County - except for a small sign that tells you.
By the mid-1950s, more than a third of all America workers in the private sector were unionized. And the unions demanded and received a fair slice of the American pie.
Medical costs are soaring because our health-care system is totally screwed up. Doctors and hospitals have every incentive to spend on unnecessary tests, drugs, and procedures.
The Tea Party is but one manifestation of a widening perception that the game is rigged in favor of the rich and powerful.
Centrism is bogus.
Public fear isn't something to be played with.
The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.
Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.
In America, people with lots of money can easily avoid the consequences of bad bets and big losses by cashing out at the first sign of trouble.
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.
You can't create a political movement out of pabulum.
If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
You might say those who can't repay their student debts shouldn't have borrowed in the first place. But they had no way of knowing just how bad the jobs market would become.
Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.
There will always be a business cycle, and white-collar workers will get hit in the next recession like they always do in recessions.
Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.
A leader is someone who steps back from the entire system and tries to build a more collaborative, more innovative system that will work over the long term.
Conservatives believe the economy functions better if the rich have more money and everyone else has less. But they're wrong. It's just the opposite.
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