Charles A. Reich Quotes

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

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

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.

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?

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

In northwest Seattle, there is an immensely popular 'old-fashioned' ice cream parlor. It is modern, spotless, and gleaming, bursting with comfortable looking people on a warm summer evening. The parlor is dedicated to nostalgia, from the old-time decor to the striped candy, the ragtime music, the costumes of the smiling young waiters, the Gibson-girl menu with its gold-rush type, and the open-handed hospitality of the Old West. It serves sandwiches, hamburgers, and kiddie 'samiches,' but its specialty is ice-cream concoctions, all of them with special names, including several so vast and elaborate that they cost several dollars and arrive with so much fanfare that all other activities stop as the waiters join in a procession as guards of honor. Nobody seems to care that the sandwiches and even the ice cream dishes have a curious blandness, so that everything tastes rather alike and it is hard to remember what one has eaten. Nothing mars the insistent, bright, wholesome good humor that presses on every side. Yet somehow there is pathos as well. For these patrons are the descendants of pioneers, of people who knew the frontiers, of men who dared the hardships of Chilkoot Pass to seek gold in the Klondike. That is their heritage, but now they only sit amid a sterile model of the past, spooning ice cream while piped-in ragtime tinkles unheard.

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

What we do not understand, we cannot control.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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, history and tradition, the amenities and civilities, the privacy and spaciousness of life, much beauty, and the fragile, slow-growing social structures that bind us together.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.