Charles A. Reich Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

Moreover, the human condition, if that is what it is, has been getting steadily worse in the Corporate State; more and more life-denying just as life should be opening up.

Charles A. Reich
My goal in life is to make people think. If I do that, I've been a success.

Charles A. Reich
What we need is a concept of "gross national cost." Life is a balance sheet, not simply economic growth. It is income and outgo. And until we know what the cost of growth is we will continue to operate under an illusion. As long as we consider only the growth of goods and ignore the growth of personal and community well-being, we will be impoverished by growth. That is what is happening in our society today.

Charles A. Reich
Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth.

Charles A. Reich
Our history shows that what we must do is assert domination over the machine, to guide it so that it works for the values of our choice.

Charles A. Reich
Surely this new age is not a repudiation of, but a fulfillment of, the American dream. What were the machines for, unless to give man a new freedom to choose how he would live?

Charles A. Reich
It gave people a great leap of hope, made people feel good. This was a world that could get better, a whole lot better. I might say to those who stuck with it in some way or other they will still swear by the values of the '60s.

Charles A. Reich
One cannot sell anything to a satisfied man. Ergo, make him want something new, or take away something that he has and then sell him something to take its place.

Charles A. Reich
The liberals were wide-ranging in their interests, ready to question the orthodoxies of the time, and looking for new horizons. It is always difficult to find people like that, but it is even more difficult today.
The liberals of the nineteen-thirties were diverse, but they had a common vision. They accepted democracy, the free market, and capitalism. However, they thought that unless the market was not corrected or ameliorated, there would be child labor, neglect of the elderly, dangerous and harmful consumer goods, monopolies squeezing people out of business and forcing down wages — in short, there would be the horror of Great Britain's Industrial Revolution before the British began passing social legislation.

Charles A. Reich
Organizations are not really "owned" by anyone. What formerly constituted ownership was split up into stockholders' rights to share in profits, management's power to set policy, employees' right to status and security, government's right to regulate. Thus older forms of wealth were replaced by new forms.

Charles A. Reich
Marx saw exploitation in terms of the rewards of human labor, but we can see it in terms of all the values of our society.

Charles A. Reich
It is not the misuse of power that is evil; the very existence of power is an evil.

Charles A. Reich
I see self-destruction now on a grand scale. That is, the unwillingness to pay for the things society needs. That's the most basic kind of self-destruction. That we're not prepared to pay for schools, we're not prepared to pay for highways. That is self-destruction. What are we doing to ourselves? It is nuts.

Charles A. Reich
The great crime of our time, says Vonnegut, was to do too much good secretly, too much harm openly.

Charles A. Reich
There is a point at which material things offer less than do some nonmaterial things. We ought to be able to live on a reasonable level and at the same time have others live on a reasonable level. Then we would not be afraid to work in our cities, we would not be at war with ourselves, which is characteristic of people in this country. If we were at peace with ourselves, we would be able to see other less material, but still quite rewarding, horizons. In The Greening of America, I did not mean that we would all become richer in material things, I meant that we would all become richer in the totality. I still think it is possible for that vision to become a reality.

Charles A. Reich
Of all the qualities of human beings that are injured, narrowed, or repressed in the Corporate State, it is consciousness, the most precious and the most fragile, that suffers the most.

Charles A. Reich
We seem to be living in a society that no one created and that no one wants.

Charles A. Reich
The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power.

Charles A. Reich
Once a person reaches Consciousness III, there is no returning to a lower consciousness.

Charles A. Reich
As Reagan conservatism is becoming less popular, people are asking: Where do we go from here? We can also ask: Does the last era of liberalism provide any indications as to where we might or should go from here?
The liberalism of the nineteen-thirties emerged after the catastrophe that resulted from the conservatism of the nineteen-twenties. Conservatives had been in power for a long time, and ended by nearly wrecking the country. Liberals came along and performed a rescue operation. Ironically, they are credited with saving the establishment, which they surely did.

Charles A. Reich
The end result of this personal and public impoverishment is a hollow man.

Charles A. Reich
What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He (or it) does not run the machine; he tends it.

Charles A. Reich
All of us are responding to the fact there is no system that can keep any promises. Everybody is fighting each other under the illusion that it is the "other people" that are causing the problem. We don't realize that we are all in the same boat. We are all suffering from the absence of a system that can pull us together and assure us that the results of each person's work will come back to him and enhance his life in some way.
Neither Democrats nor Republicans today offer any vision of how we can overcome our present difficulties and build a more satisfying life. Both offer merely palliatives and, at best, a holding pattern. We have to look beyond the politicians to see a different future.

Charles A. Reich
Perhaps the greatest and least visible form of impoverishment caused by the Corporate State is the destruction of community.

Charles A. Reich
The crucial fact to realize about all the powerful machinery of the Corporate State — its laws, structure, political system — is that it possesses no mind.

Charles A. Reich
America is dealing death, not only to people of other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut.

Charles A. Reich
The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.

Charles A. Reich
The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.

Charles A. Reich
No person's gain in wisdom is diminished by anyone else's gain.

Charles A. Reich
Technology and production can be great benefactors of man, but they are mindless instruments, and if undirected they careen along with a momentum of their own. In our country, they pulverize everything in their path - the landscape, the natural environment, history and tradition, the amenities and civilities, the privacy and spaciousness of life, much beauty, and the fragile, slow-growing social structures that bind us together.

Charles A. Reich