Charles A. Reich

“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.”

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“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.”

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

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“A work of art is not valued because it changes itself for each person who views it, it retains its own integrity and thus means something unique and marvelous to those who see it.”

“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.”

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

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

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

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

“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.”

“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?”

“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.”

“What we need is a concept of "gross national cost." Life is a balance sheet, not simply economic growth. It is income and outgo. And until we know what the cost of growth is we will continue to operate under an illusion. As long as we consider only the growth of goods and ignore the growth of personal and community well-being, we will be impoverished by growth. That is what is happening in our society today.”

“It gave people a great leap of hope, made people feel good. This was a world that could get better, a whole lot better. I might say to those who stuck with it in some way or other they will still swear by the values of the '60s.”

“I see self-destruction now on a grand scale. That is, the unwillingness to pay for the things society needs. That's the most basic kind of self-destruction. That we're not prepared to pay for schools, we're not prepared to pay for highways. That is self-destruction. What are we doing to ourselves? It is nuts.”