Charles A. Reich

“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.”

“Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions.”

“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.”

“The end result of this personal and public impoverishment is a hollow man.”

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

“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.”

“What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He (or it) does not run the machine; he tends it.”

“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.”

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

“Thus we have the spectacle, still to be seen today, of the western rancher who accepts federal aid for his cattle operations and federal aid for his grazing requirements, but bitterly opposes all social programs that do not concern him, and the philosophy that lies behind them.”

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

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

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

“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.”

“We seem to be living in a society that no one created and that no one wants.”

“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.”

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

“If there was any doubt about the need for social transformation in 1970, that need is clear and urgent today. … I am now more convinced than ever that the conflict and suffering now threatening to engulf us are entirely unnecessary, and a tragic waste of our energy and resources. We can create an economic system that is not at war with human beings or nature, and we can get from here to there by democratic means.”

“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.”