Charles A. Reich Quotes

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

What we do not understand, we cannot control.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.