Top 100 Reich Quotes
#1. We need to expand Social Security to prevent the looming retirement crisis, and we can do it simply by asking billionaires to pay their fair share.
Robert Reich
#2. The fuhrer of the Third Reich has freed the German man from his external humiliation and from the inner weakness caused by Marxism - and has returned him to the ancestral Germanic values of honor, loyalty and courage.
Conrad Grober
#3. The 'free market' is the product of laws and rules continuously emanating from legislatures, executive departments, and courts.
Robert Reich
#4. Fewer and fewer large and medium-sized companies offer their workers full health-care coverage - 74 percent did in 1980, under 10 percent do today. As a result, health insurance premiums, co-payments, and deductibles are soaring.
Robert B. Reich
#5. Those at the top would do better with a smaller share of a booming economy that elicits a positive politics than they will do with an ever-larger share of an anemic economy that fuels the politics of anger.
Robert Reich
#6. A society - any society - is defined as a set of mutual benefits and duties embodied most visibly in public institutions: public schools, public libraries, public transportation, public hospitals, public parks, public museums, public recreation, public universities, and so on.
Robert Reich
#7. Only the liberation of the natural capacity for love in human beings can master their sadistic destructiveness.
Wilhelm Reich
#8. The German Reich is a Republic, and whoever doesn't believe it gets one in the neck.
Alfred Doblin
#9. Regressives say small businesses would be hurt by a higher marginal tax. Don't believe this, either. Only just over 1 percent of small-business owners earn enough to be taxed at the top rate - and that's just on the portion of their incomes exceeding $379,000. The
Robert B. Reich
#10. We do not see it because we can not afford to-because the truth is too explosive.
Charles A. Reich
#11. In truth, government has been good to Wall Street and big business.
Robert Reich
#12. We used to be so proud that our country offered far more economic opportunities than the feudal system in Great Britain, with its royal family, princesses and dukes. But social mobility in the UK is higher than in the US. Our social rift is as big as it was in the 1920s.
Robert Reich
#13. When I was a kid, the bigger boys would pick on me. So I got an idea that I would make alliances with older boys, like just one or two, who would be my protectors.
Robert Reich
#14. The fact that political ideologies are tangible realities is not a proof of their vitally necessary character. The bubonic plague was an extraordinarily powerful social reality, but no one would have regarded it as vitally necessary.
Wilhelm Reich
#15. One tax dodge often used by multi-national companies is to squirrel their earnings abroad in foreign subsidiaries located in countries where taxes are lower.
Robert Reich
#16. Most intellectual people do not believe in God, but they fear him just the same.
Wilhelm Reich
#17. Liberals are concerned about the concentration of wealth because it almost inevitably leads to a concentration of power that undermines democracy.
Robert Reich
#18. The only way to make sure no bank is too big to fail is to make sure no bank is too big.
Robert Reich
#19. The fact that Hitler was a political genius unmasks the nature of politics in general as no other fact can.
Wilhelm Reich
#20. Median wages of production workers, who comprise 80 percent of the workforce, haven't risen in 30 years, adjusted for inflation.
Robert Reich
#21. One cannot equate "capitalism" and "democracy.
Wilhelm Reich
#22. The external appearance of any construction projects that are created during the time of the National Socialist Reich must take on the sensibility of our time.
Fritz Todt
#23. The federal budget deficit isn't the nation's major economic problem and deficit reduction shouldn't be our major goal.
Our problem is lack of good jobs and sufficient growth, and our goal must be to revive both.
Robert Reich
#24. 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 Reich
#25. As long as the big banks are allowed to remain big, their political leverage over Washington will remain big. And as long as their political leverage remains big, the taxpayer and economic tab for the next mess they create will be big.
Robert Reich
#26. Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times. There is only one thing that counts: to live one's life well and happily ...
Wilhelm Reich
#27. 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.
Robert Reich
#28. Nothing makes us angrier than the fear that some pleasure is being enjoyed by others but forever denied to us.
Charles A. Reich
#29. 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 Reich
#30. It is doubtful if a more extensive anthology of errors (William Shirer's Rise and Fall of the Third Reich) concerning the personality and policies of Hitler and the causes and responsibility for the Second World War has ever been assembled, even in war time.
Harry Elmer Barnes
#31. In order to provide the German housewife, above all mothers of many children ... with tangible relief from her burdens, the Fuhrer has commissioned me to bring into the Reich from the eastern territories some four to five hundred thousand select, healthy, and strong girls.
Fritz Sauckel
#32. The fastest growing occupation in the private sector is security guards. The fastest growing occupation in the public sector is prison guards. (1992)
Robert Reich
#33. Those who analogize the federal budget to a family's budget must know nothing about either.
Robert Reich
#34. The pyromaniacs of the Third Reich were now playing their final scene on the stage of the world: they who had set the world aflame were now perishing in their own fires.
Miklos Nyiszli
#35. Power, no matter what kind of power it is, without a foundation in truth, is a dictatorship, more or less and in one way or another, for it is always based on man's fear of the social responsibility and personal burden that "freedom" entails.
Wilhelm Reich
#36. Obviously, personal responsibility is important. But there's no evidence that people who are poor are less ambitious than anyone else. In fact, many work long hours at backbreaking jobs.
Robert Reich
#37. At the same time, most of what government does that helps them is now so deeply woven into the thread of daily life that it's no longer recognizable as government.
Robert B. Reich
#38. As digital equipment replaces the jobs of routine workers and lower-level professionals, technicians are needed to install, monitor, repair, test, and upgrade all the equipment.
Robert Reich
#39. The core principle is that we want an economy that works for everyone, not just for a small elite. We want equal opportunity, not equality of outcome. We want to make sure that there's upward mobility again, in our society and in our economy.
Robert Reich
#40. We shall no longer hang on to the tails of public opinion or to a non- existent authority on matters utterly unknown and strange. We shall gradually become experts ourselves in the mastery of the knowledge of the Future.
Wilhelm Reich
#41. Public institutions are supported by all taxpayers and are available to all.
Robert Reich
#42. 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.
Robert Reich
#44. Rather than subsidize 'American' exporters, it makes more sense to subsidize any global company - to the extent it's adding to its exports from the United States.
Robert Reich
#45. In 1968, the sanitation workers of Memphis tried to form a union. The city resisted. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. came to support them. That was where he lost his life.
Robert Reich
#46. One of the most clearly marked trends for over twenty years has been the decline in civil liberties.
Charles A. Reich
#47. One of the problems with fame ... is they try to pigeonhole you ... like I'm stuck with The Greening of America for the rest of my life.
Charles A. Reich
#48. 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 Reich
#49. The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.
Charles A. Reich
#50. Revolutionary practice in any field of human existence develops by itself if one comprehends the contradictions in every new process; it consists in siding with those forces which act in the direction of progressive development.
Wilhelm Reich
#51. The unity and congruity of culture and nature, work and love, morality and sexuality, longed for from time immemorial, will remain a dream as long as man continues to condemn the biological demand for natural sexual gratification.
Wilhelm Reich
#52. Gentlemen, I must ask you to rid yourselves of all feeling of pity. We must annihilate the Jews wherever we find them and wherever it is possible in order to maintain there the structure of the Reich as a whole ...
Hans Frank
#53. Technology is changing so fast that knowledge about specifics can quickly become obsolete. That's why so much of what technicians learn is on the job.
Robert Reich
#54. The choice is not, Reich argues, between a governed and an ungoverned market, but between a market governed by laws favoring monopolistic companies and one governed by those favoring small business.
Arlie Russell Hochschild
#55. Many of the political jokes that circulated in the Third Reich were directed at Goering. He collected them [all] in a large leather notebook and delighted in re-telling most of them to his friends.
Richard Overy
#56. These clashes are the only evolu-tionary possibility which will enable us one day, now that Fate has given us the Fuehrer Adolf Hitler, to create the Germanic Reich.
Heinrich Himmler
#57. Freedom is the one value conservatives place above all others, yet time and again, their ideal of freedom ignores the growing imbalance of power in our society that's eroding the freedoms of most people.
Robert Reich
#58. I grew up poor. My mother raised a family of four on between $9,000 and $15,000 a year.
Robert Reich
#59. Rooting in work is crucial to any accomplishment. Rooting in mere enthusiasm will in the long run force illusory measures to keep the fires of empty enthusiasm going. And this makes politics and politicians.
Wilhelm Reich
#60. I am a massive fan of early electronica like Steve Reich, Pat Metheny and Thomas Dolby. I used to be a big raver, too, so anything dance. I love ambient music like Tunng. I love acoustic and classical, too.
Kate Fleetwood
#61. If we give up on politics, we're done for. Powerlessness is a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Robert Reich
#62. I'm 40 years old. What I have seen my whole life is widening income inequality.
Robert Reich
#63. Open avowal of dictatorship is much less dangerous than sham democracy. The first one can fight; sham democracy is insidious.
Wilhelm Reich
#64. The Olympic games held in Berlin in August 1936 afforded the Nazis a golden opportunity to impress the world with the achievements of the Third Reich, and they made the most of it.
William L. Shirer
#65. When the Reich could no longer pay its obligations, Germany would go bankrupt.
Edwin Black
#66. The fundamental problem of political philosophy is still precisely the one that Spinoza saw so clearly (and that Wilhelm Reich rediscovered): Why do men fight for their servitude as stubbornly as though it were their salvation?
Gilles Deleuze
#67. Even in November 1938, after five years of anti-Semitic legislation and persecution, they still owned, according to the Times correspondent in Berlin, something like a third of the real property in the Reich.
Arthur Bryant
#68. Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth.
Charles A. Reich
#69. Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them.
Robert Reich
#70. She admitted that his nerves were ragged. 'But why?' asked Reich. Surely things were going excellently for the company. 'Oh yes,' she said. 'But when a man is President of a concern as big as A.I.U., he gets into the habit of worrying, and sometimes can't stop.
Colin Wilson
#71. It's not government's business what people do in their private bedrooms.
Robert Reich
#72. The elimination of individual capitalists and the replacement of private capitalism by state capitalism in Russia has not in the least altered the typical helpless and authoritarian character structure of the masses of people.
Wilhelm Reich
#73. Political scientists after World War II hypothesized that even though the voices of individual Americans counted for little, most people belonged to a variety of interest groups and membership organizations - clubs, associations, political parties, unions - to which politicians were responsive.
Robert Reich
#74. Am I a Spaceman? Do I belong to a new race on earth, bred by men from outer space in embraces with earth women?
Wilhelm Reich
#75. Mistaking insolence for freedom has always been the hallmark of the slave.
Wilhelm Reich
#76. There's more than a few remnants left in German welfare policy today. Many Germans eagerly condemn Hitler's fascism but won't examine the other reasons why the Third Reich succeeded for a season.
Suzanne Fields
#77. On the Republican playing field, Republicans always win.
Robert Reich
#78. Should the German people lay down their arms, the Soviets ... would occupy all eastern and south-eastern Europe, together with the greater part of the [German] Reich. All over this territory, which would be of an enormous extent, an iron curtain would at once descend.
Joseph Goebbels
#79. What I don't want to do is to go and buy a bunch of exotic-looking drums and set up an Afrikanische Musik in New York City.
Steve Reich
#80. As a matter of fact, I personally would much rather hear Perotin than Mozart.
Steve Reich
#81. More people are killed by stray bullets every day in America than have been killed by Ebola here. More are dying because of poverty and hunger.
Robert Reich
#82. A pastor who lived through the Third Reich described his meetings with Nazi officials in a way that illuminates life in totalitarian societies: "[O]ne would be pushed further, step by step, until he had crossed over the line, without noticing that his spine was being bent millimeter by millimeter.
Randall L. Bytwerk
#83. There is a crisis of public morality. Instead of policing bedrooms, we ought to be doing a better job policing boardrooms.
Robert Reich
#84. Standing up to bullies is the hallmark of a civilized society.
Robert Reich
#85. I'm not making any absurd comparisons between myself and Bach, but I aspire to that, that my music will have the legs to survive whatever context it finds itself in.
Steve Reich
#86. 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 Reich
#87. Bankruptcy laws allow companies to smoothly reorganize, but not college graduates burdened by student loans.
Robert Reich
#88. The monied interests are doing what they do best - making money. The rest of us need to do what we can do best - use our voices, our vigor, and our votes.
Robert Reich
#89. You might say those who can't repay their student debts shouldn't have borrowed in the first place. But they had no way of knowing just how bad the jobs market would become.
Robert Reich
#90. We need a national infrastructure bank to rebuild our crumbling highways and water and sewer systems, thereby putting additional people back to work.
Robert Reich
#91. Official boundaries are often hard to see. If you head north on Woodward Avenue, away from downtown Detroit, you wouldn't know exactly when you left the city and crossed over into Oakland County - except for a small sign that tells you.
Robert Reich
#92. 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
#93. 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.
Robert Reich
#94. Along with individual responsibility goes some societal responsibility to enable young people and their parents to do what they need to do. Otherwise, what is a society?
Robert B. Reich
#95. The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness.
Wilhelm Reich
#96. A day came when I should have died, and after that nothing seemed very important. So I have stayed as I am, without regret, separated from the normal human condition.
Guy Sajer
#97. Notionally a left-wing movement, the Anti-Germans were born after the collapse of the Berlin wall. While most Germans rejoiced at the end of the Cold War, the Anti-Germans feared that a united Germany might lead to a fourth Reich - and a return of anti-Semitism.
Luke Harding
#98. Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions.
Charles A. Reich
#99. 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
#100. In reality, most of America's poor work hard, often in two or more jobs.
Robert Reich
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