Best 139 quotes of Robert Reich on MyQuotes

Robert Reich

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    Robert Reich

    A funny thing happened to the First Amendment on its way to the public forum. According to the Supreme Court, money is now speech and corporations are now people. But when real people without money assemble to express their dissatisfaction with the political consequences of this, they’re treated as public nuisances and evicted.

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    Robert Reich

    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.

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    Robert Reich

    A lot of attention has been going to social values - abortion, gay rights, other divisive issues - but economic values are equally important.

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    Robert Reich

    America has become the most unequal society among advanced countries, and rich people are now free to spend as much money on political campaigns as they wish.

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    Robert Reich

    America's real business leaders understand unless or until the middle class regains its footing and its faith, capitalism remains vulnerable.

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    Robert Reich

    And now we're suffering the logical culmination of all this: the largest group of government-hati ng, racist, homophobic, misogynistic know-nothing, climate-change denying, evolution-denyi ng, science-denying , anti-immigrant House Republicans in history, bent on taking America back to the 19th century.

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    Robert Reich

    Anyone believing the TPP is good for Americans take note: The foreign subsidiaries of U.S.-based corporations could just as easily challenge any U.S. government regulation they claim unfairly diminishes their profits - say, a regulation protecting American consumers from unsafe products or unhealthy foods, investors from fraudulent securities or predatory lending, workers from unsafe working conditions, taxpayers from another bailout of Wall Street, or the environment from toxic emissions.

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    Robert Reich

    As a top manager, you have to not just reward truth-telling, you've got to beg for it, and you've got to demand that everyone around you gives you constructive criticism, constantly. You've got to get out of the bubble, so that you can get direct feedback from everybody who's being affected.

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    Robert Reich

    A smaller government reflecting the needs of the middle class and poor is superior to a big government reflecting the needs of the privileged and powerful.

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    Robert Reich

    As to the meaning of "corporate social responsibility," Friedman and I would agree: If a certain action improves the corporation's bottom line, there's no point in labeling it "socially responsible." It's just good business.

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    Robert Reich

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

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    Robert Reich

    Being critical of the nation is a far cry from being unpatriotic or anti-American. In fact, most social criticism . . . is based on a love of America's ideals and a concern we're not living up to them.

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    Robert Reich

    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.

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    Robert Reich

    Bill Clinton was a very, very good speaker. But like many people who are great speakers and great thinkers and have a lot of energy and ambition, he talked too much.

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    Robert Reich

    Britain's is traditionally a rigid class society.

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    Robert Reich

    Corporations are not people, despite what the Supreme Court says, and they don't need or deserve handouts.

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    Robert Reich

    Corporations don't create jobs, customers do. So when all the economic gains go to the top, as they're doing now, the vast majority of Americans don't have enough purchasing power to buy the things corporations want to sell - which means businesses stop creating enough jobs.

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    Robert Reich

    Cutting taxes is not bad. But if you cut taxes on the wealthy, which is what they wanted to do, you're not helping people who need better schools and better infrastructure and healthcare. You're basically robbing the middle class and the poor to provide tax cuts to the rich.

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    Robert Reich

    Cynicism is the largest obstacle to social change. Cynicism is dangerous because people throw up their hands and say, "Well it's not possible. Why should I even try?

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    Robert Reich

    Cynicism is the last refuge of those who don't want to do the work of creating a better society.

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    Robert Reich

    Disney is no longer just Mickey Mouse; Disney is family entertainment. And we're seeing more and more brands change into something that is far greater and broader than individual products and services.

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    Robert Reich

    Education is not the only answer and it's certainly not the immediate solution. At best, it's a necessary, but not sufficient response to widening inequality.

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    Robert Reich

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

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    Robert Reich

    Given that ever-broadening array of options and alternatives, as consumers and investors, we are often bewildered. We need guidance. That's where today's brands come in. They are not so much signals about a particular product, they are signals about good judgment, trustworthiness. A big brand, whether it's Schwab or Disney, is becoming analogous to a portal that sells us advice about where we can find great deals.

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    Robert Reich

    Globalization and free trade do spur economic growth, and they lead to lower prices on many goods.

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    Robert Reich

    Here's why I think the public service jobs are almost unavoidable: When we have downturns in the economy - and we will, for we haven't repealed the business cycle - unemployment will build, yet we no longer have any safety net. What are we going to do? Unless we decide to pull out all the stops and lower interest rates immediately and risk turning a recession into wild inflation, we're going to have to figure out some way of providing some more, not job security, but employment security.

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    Robert Reich

    Higher education isn't just a personal investment. It's a public good that pays off in a more competitive workforce and better-informed and engaged citizens. Every year, we spend nearly $100 billion on corporate welfare, and more than $500 billion on defense spending. Surely ensuring the next generation can compete in the global economy is at least as important as subsidies for big business and military adventures around the globe. In fact, I think we can and must go further - not just making public higher education tuition-free, but reinventing education in America as we know it.

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    Robert Reich

    I am not an economic determinist. If I were, I would throw up my hands; I just would not bother. I think it's wrong to be an economic determinist. I think it's wrong to simply say, "Well, inevitably, if you're poor, you're going to get a lousy education; if you're lower-middle class, the cards are going to be stacked against you, and you'll probably never get anywhere".

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    Robert Reich

    I don't think that our problem, our jobs problem, is fundamentally a problem of trade. I think it has much more to do with the fact that we have not sufficiently educated our population. We have not got out of this great recession with adequate stimulus and adequate fiscal and monetary policies over all.

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    Robert Reich

    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.

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    Robert 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.

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    Robert Reich

    If you give up on politics, you're giving up on democracy. And if you give up on democracy, you're basically saying to the moneyed interests, the powerful people and institutions of society, take it all. That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. Then we give up. Then we are 100 percent plutocracy.

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    Robert Reich

    I grew up poor. My mother raised a family of four on between $9,000 and $15,000 a year.

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    Robert Reich

    I have found over the years that the most important way of getting people to relax is self-deprecating humor.

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    Robert Reich

    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.

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    Robert Reich

    I'm 40 years old. What I have seen my whole life is widening income inequality.

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    Robert Reich

    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.

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    Robert Reich

    I'm quite optimistic when it comes to the capacity of our people to have an honest discussion about what's really going on. What do you think John McCain's candidacy was about? And the early days of Bill Bradley's candidacy? People are hungry for a genuine, no-spin set of ideas and truths. They want their leaders to tell it like it is. There is a great demand for this. Politicians continually underestimate the ability of the American public to understand what's happening to them and what the real choices are.

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    Robert Reich

    In a world where routine production is footloose...competitive advantage lies not in one-time breakthroughs but in continual improvements. Stable technologies get away.

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    Robert Reich

    Inequality is bad for everyone, not just the middle class and the poor.

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    Robert Reich

    In journalism, there are only two stories - "Oh, the wonder of it," and "Oh, the shame of it.

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    Robert Reich

    In the '90s it was irrational exuberance. Now it may be irrational doom and gloom.

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    Robert Reich

    In the early 1970s, Milton Friedman argued that corporations should not be socially responsible because they had no mandate to be; they existed to make money, not to be charitable institutions. But in the economy of the 21st century, corporations cannot be socially responsible, if social responsibility is understood to mean sacrificing profits for the sake of some perceived social good. That's because competition has become so much more intense.

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    Robert Reich

    In the life of a nation, few ideas are more dangerous than good solutions to the wrong problems.

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    Robert Reich

    In Washington, it's dog eat dog. In academia, it's exactly the opposite.

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    Robert Reich

    I started in the law; and the study of law, when it precedes the study of economics, gives you a set of foundation principles about how human beings interact. Economics is very useful, and I studied economics in graduate school. But without understanding the social and organizational context of economics, it becomes a theory without any groundwork.

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    Robert Reich

    I think it's hard to have a brand portal and an economy of trustworthiness in one of them that sloshes over into another. But saying that there will be only a limited number of these giant brand portals doesn't mean a limited number of companies; it doesn't mean that everybody's going to be working for these companies. Quite the opposite. Most of us will be working through much smaller entities that simply use these portals as vehicles for getting and identifying customers.

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    Robert Reich

    I think re-engineering or restructuring or downsizing or rightsizing or whatever you want to call it, it's basically firing, has gone way too far. Employees, as I've talked to them across the country, feel that they are not respected, they are not valued, they are worried about their jobs. They simply feel that the company is no longer loyal to them. Why should they be loyal to the company, they ask me. Why should I go the extra mile? Why should I care?

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    Robert Reich

    I think that in politics, when people want to discredit a particular position, they say, "Oh, they are liberals," or "They are conservatives; we are centrists." Everybody wants to be a centrist.

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    Robert Reich

    I think that it's difficult to talk about large questions of economics or social policy without understanding the building blocks of society. And those building blocks are organizations, the people who run them, and the people who work in them.