Charles A. Reich Quotes

43 Sourced Quotes

Nothing makes us angrier than the fear that some pleasure is being enjoyed by others but forever denied to us.

Charles A. Reich
We do not see it because we can not afford to-because the truth is too explosive.

Charles A. Reich
One of the most clearly marked trends for over twenty years has been the decline in civil liberties.

Charles A. Reich
There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land.
This is the revolution of the new generation.

Charles A. Reich
The question was what's happening to the individual in America? Is the individual going the way of the environment, being destroyed? In other words, were we becoming the creatures of the machine?
That was the way people thought in the '60s. Now maybe that's passé today but that's the kind of thing people thought about. Are we turning into machines? They wanted to rebel against that.
Their rebellion cannot be called a success by any means, far from it. Those of us who tried are very grateful that we tried to the degree we did. Anybody who achieved any success against the machine feels good about it.

Charles A. Reich
Thus we have the spectacle, still to be seen today, of the western rancher who accepts federal aid for his cattle operations and federal aid for his grazing requirements, but bitterly opposes all social programs that do not concern him, and the philosophy that lies behind them.

Charles A. Reich
There is every reason to fear that the State is growing ever more powerful, more autonomous, more indifferent to its own inhabitants.

Charles A. Reich
The machine itself has begun to do the work of revolution. The State is now generating forces that will accomplish what no revolutionaries could accomplish by themselves.

Charles A. Reich
Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions.

Charles A. Reich
To the American people of 1789, their nation promised a new way of life: each individual a free man; each having the right to seek his own happiness; a republican form of government in which the people would be sovereign; and no arbitrary power over people's lives. Less than two hundred years later, almost every aspect of the dream has been lost.

Charles A. Reich
The country we live in is a laboratory. We have one experiment after another. Unfortunately, it is not a laboratory where no one gets hurt: some lives are enhanced, others are ruined. We have to view our society with concern and passion, and see what we can learn from each of our experiments. When we get upset and angry about politics — whether it is conservative, liberal, or whatever — we tend to think in terms of right and wrong, not what we can learn.

Charles A. Reich
If there was any doubt about the need for social transformation in 1970, that need is clear and urgent today. … I am now more convinced than ever that the conflict and suffering now threatening to engulf us are entirely unnecessary, and a tragic waste of our energy and resources. We can create an economic system that is not at war with human beings or nature, and we can get from here to there by democratic means.

Charles A. Reich
A work of art is not valued because it changes itself for each person who views it, it retains its own integrity and thus means something unique and marvelous to those who see it.

Charles A. Reich