Top 160 Robert B. Reich Quotes (2025 Update)
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101. “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.”

— Robert B. Reich

102. “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.”

— Robert B. Reich

103. “The rich would do better with a smaller share of a rapidly growing economy then they’re doing now with a large share of an economy that is barely growing at all.”

— Robert B. Reich

104. “By 2016, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984, while the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Income has become almost as unequal as wealth: Between 1972 and 2016 the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy nearly doubled in size. Most of the income gains went to the top.”

— Robert B. Reich

105. “We can help restore the common good by striving for it and showing others it’s worth the effort.”

— Robert B. Reich

106. “The economy exists to serve us. We do not exist to serve it.”

— Robert B. Reich

107. “I think the Obama Administration has done a lousy job marketing and selling and explaining this entire thing. And, as a result, all of these right-wing front organizations financed by the Koch brothers, are blanketing the airwaves with lies about Obamacare. And people are scared.”

— Robert B. Reich

108. “Angry voters are more willing to support candidates who vilify their opponents and find easy scapegoats. Talking heads have become shouting heads. Many Americans have grown cynical about our collective ability to solve our problems. And that cynicism has become a self-fulfilling prophecy, as nothing gets solved.”

— Robert B. Reich

109. “Carl Friedrich captured the distinction in 1935: “To be an American is an ideal, while to be a Frenchman is a fact.”

— Robert B. Reich

110. “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.”

— Robert B. Reich

111. “There are party leaders, big corporation, Wall Street. There are very wealthy individuals who kind of represent where the Democratic Party, the official Democratic Party was and to some extent still is.”

— Robert B. Reich

112. “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.”

— Robert B. Reich

113. “Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.”

— Robert B. Reich

114. “America’s original sin was not the exclusion of people born outside the nation’s borders from citizenship. It was the exclusion of many people who had lived here even before the start of the Republic – in particular, Native Americans and African Americans. For most of its existence, America found it relatively easy to assimilate foreigners, although there were periods of sharp and even violent tension.”

— Robert B. Reich

115. “I want a shot for people like me to grow up and do something with themselves.”

— Robert B. Reich

116. “Yet the notion that you’re paid what you’re “worth” is by now so deeply ingrained in the public consciousness that many who earn very little assume it’s their own fault.”

— Robert B. Reich

117. “When the President decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from congress.”

— Robert B. Reich

118. “I believe we’re bound together by the ideals and principles we share, and the mutual obligations those principles entail.”

— Robert B. Reich

119. “In 1934, when the economy began emerging from the bottom of the Great Depression, it grew 7.7 percent. The next year it grew more than 8 percent. In 1936 it grew a whopping 14.1 percent.”

— Robert B. Reich

120. “The simultaneous rise of both the working poor and non-working rich offers further evidence that earnings no longer correlate with effort.”

— Robert B. Reich

121. “I do not expect to see monopoly restrain itself. If there are men in this country big enough to own the government of the United States, they are going to own it.”

— Robert B. Reich

122. “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.”

— Robert B. Reich

123. “Rand, Nozick, and their more modern incarnations are dangerously wrong. Not only does the common good exist, but it is essential for a society to function. Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn’t even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.”

— Robert B. Reich

124. “No economy can continue to function when the vast middle class and everybody else don’t have enough purchasing power to buy what the economy is capable of producing without going deeper and deeper into debt.”

— Robert B. Reich

125. “Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms.”

— Robert B. Reich

126. “We “bowl alone,” as sociologist Robert Putnam has put it. Yet this fails to account for a monumental shift in whom we join and for what. We still join together, but now we join for services too expensive to purchase alone – child care, the schools our children attend, recreational facilities, and security...”

— Robert B. Reich

127. “What we have lost, I think, is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals – the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.”

— Robert B. Reich

128. “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.”

— Robert B. Reich

129. “For three decades almost all the gains from economic growth have gone to the top. In the 1960s and 1970s, the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans got 9–10 percent of our total income. By 2007, just before the Great Recession, that share had more than doubled, to 23.5 percent. Over the same period the wealthiest one-tenth of 1 percent tripled its share. We haven’t experienced this degree of concentrated wealth since the Gilded Age of the late nineteenth century.”

— Robert B. Reich

130. “They found that flights with a first-class section were nearly four times more likely to have incidents of “belligerent behavior” or “emotional outbursts” in their economy class. Such incidents were even more likely when economy passengers had to walk through the first-class section to get to their seats than when they entered through the middle of the plane and bypassed the first-class section.”

— Robert B. Reich

131. “On the Republican playing field, Republicans always win.”

— Robert B. Reich

132. “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.”

— Robert B. Reich

133. “A market – any market – requires that government make and enforce the rules of the game. In most modern democracies, such rules emanate from legislatures, administrative agencies, and courts. Government doesn’t “intrude” on the “free market.” It creates the market.”

— Robert B. Reich

134. “After examining 1,799 policy issues in detail, two eminent researchers, Princeton professor Martin Gilens and Professor Benjamin Page of Northwestern University, concluded that “the preferences of the average American appear to have only a minuscule, near-zero, statistically non-significant impact upon public policy.”

— Robert B. Reich

135. “But as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.”

— Robert B. Reich

136. “Do you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?”

— Robert B. Reich

137. “Forget what you may have learned about the choice between the “free market” and government. A market cannot exist without a government to organize and enforce it. The important question is whom the market has been organized to serve.”

— Robert B. Reich

138. “You can’t create a political movement out of pabulum.”

— Robert B. Reich

139. “It is impossible to fight bullies merely by saying they’re going too far.”

— Robert B. Reich

140. “The only way America can reduce the long-term budget deficit, maintain vital services, protect Social Security and Medicare, invest more in education and infrastructure, and not raise taxes on the working middle class is by raising taxes on the super rich.”

— Robert B. Reich

141. “With declining state and local spending, total public spending on education, infrastructure, and basic research has dropped from 12 percent of GDP in the 1970s to less than 3 percent in 2011.”

— Robert B. Reich

142. “Indentured servitude is banned, but what about students seeking to sell shares of their future earnings in exchange for money up front to pay for their college tuitions?”

— Robert B. Reich

143. “If you give up on democracy, you might as well give up on everything.”

— Robert B. Reich

144. “As more windows shatter, other aspects of community life also start unraveling. The unspoken norm becomes: Do whatever you want here because everyone else is doing it.”

— Robert B. Reich

145. “In 1980, the richest one-hundredth of 1 percent of Americans provided 10 percent of contributions to federal elections. By 2012, they provided 40 percent. The Supreme Court has made all this worse through a series of decisions holding that money is speech under the First Amendment and corporations are people.”

— Robert B. Reich

146. “I know it’s hard to imagine, but even a president of the United States could act like Shkreli.”

— Robert B. Reich

147. “The problem is not the size of government but whom the government is for.”

— Robert B. Reich

148. “As the economic historian Karl Polanyi recognized, those who argue for “less government” are really arguing for a different government – often one that favors them or their patrons.1.”

— Robert B. Reich

149. “The problem right now is jobs. The problem right now is the economy and economic growth.”

— Robert B. Reich

150. “We’re the richest economy in the history of the world. For the majority of Americans not to get the benefits of this extraordinarily prosperous economy, there’s something fundamentally wrong.”

— Robert B. Reich