Top 252 Quotes & Sayings by Robert Reich - Page 5

The presidency is probably the loneliest office in America. Regardless of your friends, regardless of how good your marriage is, regardless of anything, you are alone there at the top.

The poverty line understates the true amount of poverty because it measures it as three times the breadbasket that a family needs, but it doesn't consider all the other things that are inflating far, far faster than food prices.

Bill Clinton was a great politician. Bill Clinton loved a fight. He was willing to fight. But he also wanted to be loved. He wanted to be admired.

Most Americans stopped looking at what was happening through a variety of coping mechanisms - starting with women entering paid work and then everyone working longer hours and using their homes for raising equity and generating more money through debt. The typical household basically staved off the day of reckoning.

We are paying teachers who are in charge of our human capital, arguably more important than our financial capital, a very tiny fraction of what Wall Streeters are paid.

We can't know in advance what history is going to say, but I would be utterly amazed and surprised if this entire adventure, this entire Iraqi invasion from the beginning of its inception, were not judged to be an utter failure and a terrible, terrible thing for the world.

If consumers don't have the wherewithal to spend because all the money's going to the top, and the people at the top only spend a very small fraction of what they earn, then the economy is almost inevitably destined to slow.

One of the things I tell my students is that if you want to understand what's been going on and also what needs to be done, you've got to get out of the blame game. Some people on the left want to blame the rich and corporations. Some people on the right want to blame the poor and government. Either of those frames of reference gets you nowhere and they aren't even truthful. You've got to understand the dynamic itself.

Every organization, no matter who it is, just follow the money.

You`ve got to just follow the money [in Washington]. You see it. There`s no countervailing power.

The United States is a safe harbor.

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.