Robert Reich Quotes

The rich stick together; the poor and the marginalised are thrown together.

Growing up on, say, the Upper East Side, you're so isolated. If you go to the Hamptons every weekend, you never talk to a construction worker, and the construction worker would never talk to you.

Colleges and universities divide families by income, providing access to the best schools for those with accumulated wealth. Low- or moderate-income families are relegated to the less prestigious schools where the resources for advancement are fewer than those provided at better financed schools.

This College system went into practice to draw a line of demarcation between the two classes of society—it separated the children of the rich from the children of the poor.

The wall between rich and poor is a wall of glass which all can see.

It wasn't until sixth grade, at P.S. 168, when my teacher took us on a field trip to her house that I realized we were poor. I have no idea what my teacher's intentions were - whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip.

The chasm between rich and poor is becoming larger, and I think it's interesting terrain to talk about and expose.

The thing that really struck me when I went to junior high was class. I grew up on a pretty poor street, but the school district I was in included some fine neighborhoods - so I got to know a couple of the kids from those places and went to their houses and experienced such culture shock.

The benefit of rich families putting their child through Harvard is always going to exist. But it's quite evident that there are 700 million peasants in China who are never going to go to Harvard.

As the rich consume more and more, they are clearly not going to want to downgrade their own status.

We live in a very unequal society.

We can't have Harlem become one borough for the rich.

We can't have it so there are skyscrapers side by side with slums.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

People talk about places like Mumbai as a tale of two cities, as if the rich and poor don't have anything to do with each other.

At the end of the day, we have an economy that works for the rich by cheating the poor, and unequal schools are the result of that, not the cause.

It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.

If everybody lives in the same way, there's something almost narcotizing about it, but the true misery of economic class difference is knowing that you can't have what somebody else does.

Everything in America is so stratified by class now. We have the 93rd level of income inequality in the world. You're already seeing highway lanes that are for pay and ones that aren't.

The trouble is not that schools don't work; they do. They're excellent machines for achieving historically accepted purposes. In suburban schools are children of the rich, who grow up to privilege and anesthetic oblivion to pain - and who then use the servants produced by ghetto schools.

To be clear, the gap between the have gots and the have nots is widening. In this most multicultural, multiracial, multiethnic America ever, that concerns me.

The difference between rich and poor is becoming more extreme, and as income inequality widens the wealth gap in major nations, education, health and social mobility are all threatened.

And, for an instant, she stared directly into those soft blue eyes and knew, with an instinctive mammalian certainty, that the exceedingly rich were no longer even remotely human.

I live in the social purgatory of the San Fernando Valley, while my eldest daughter is bused to a charter school in the fantasy land of Bel Air.

Social inequality … divides society into two classes -- the wage-slaves and the grabbers of capital