Robert Reich People Quotations

You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring.

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.

Over the long term, the only way we're going to raise wages, grow the economy, and improve American competitiveness is by investing in our people - especially their educations.

Average working people need more fresh starts. Big corporations, banks, and Donald Trump need fewer.

Our young people - their capacities to think, understand, investigate, and innovate - are America's future.

We need a national infrastructure bank to rebuild our crumbling highways and water and sewer systems, thereby putting additional people back to work.

Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together.

Government subsidies to elite private universities take the form of tax deductions for people who make charitable contributions to them.

It's not government's business what people do in their private bedrooms.

In America, people with lots of money can easily avoid the consequences of bad bets and big losses by cashing out at the first sign of trouble.

Economies are risky. Some industries rise, and others implode, like housing. Some places get richer, and others drop, like Atlantic City. Some people get new jobs that pay better, many lose their jobs or their wages.

Too many young people graduate laden with debts that take years, if not decades, to pay off.

I'm all in favor of supporting fancy museums and elite schools, but face it: These aren't really charities as most people understand the term.

Only if everyone buys insurance can insurers afford to cover people with preexisting conditions or pay the costs of catastrophic diseases.

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.

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.

We're going to have to have a massive program to get these people permanent housing, ideally near or in their former communities, to get them jobs, to help restart businesses and to provide transportation,

Employers have to understand that if they want to attract and keep good people, they've got to treat those people as whole people who have lives outside work,

The most important community for an individual will not necessarily be a company but a looser community of people with similar skills and social connections. Continually building up those skills and connections is what a career is today.

Your most precious possession is not your financial assets. Your most precious possession is the people you have working there, and what they carry around in their heads, and their ability to work together.

Almost a third of these people were below the poverty line, ... would have to include a broad-based plan to revive business, industries and jobs.

The gap between college graduates going into lucrative positions and those going into more normal positions is exploding. We've not seen a time in living memory when so many young people made so much money, and some peers are wondering what they have in common anymore.

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.

Humor itself is a great disinfectant. It enables people to listen.

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.

The world of politics is divided between people who are introverts - who lose a little bit of energy out of each interaction they have so that by the time the day ends, after 1,000 interactions, they're exhausted - and people like Bill Clinton who are extroverted - who get a little bit of energy from each interaction.

One of the things I tell my students is that if you want to understand what's been going on and also what needs to be done, you've got to get out of the blame game. Some people on the left want to blame the rich and corporations. Some people on the right want to blame the poor and government. Either of those frames of reference gets you nowhere and they aren't even truthful. You've got to understand the dynamic itself.

To be a skilled politician, you have to be genuine. To really make it work, you have to love people. You have to love the contact, you have to love the energy, you've gotta love inspiring people and getting their adulation in return. You can't separate what's genuine from what is necessary.

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

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.

If leadership is about anything, it's about leading. Not leading people back to where they already are, because they don't need that. They're already there.

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

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

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.

We are creating a one size fits all system that needlessly brands many young people as failures, when they might thrive if offered a different education whose progress was measured differently. Paradoxically we're embracing standardized tests just when the economy is eliminating standardized jobs.

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?"

Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.

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.