Charles A. Reich Quotes

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

There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture . . .

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.

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.

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.

Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions.

there is every reason to fear that the State is growing ever more powerful, more autonomous, more indifferent to its own inhabitants.

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

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

What we do not understand, we cannot control.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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