Robert Reich Quotes

If you take any populated place - any major city in America - and drive 45 minutes from that spot directly out of town you'll be in about as country a place as you'll ever find.

From the top of the quarry cliffs, one could see the New Jersey suburbs bordered by the New York City skyline.

Big city mayors don't play well with voters outside their city anymore. Just ask John Lindsay, Ed Koch, Kevin White, Tom Bradley, Dick Riordon. Rudy Giuliani is no exception.

You are fortunate to live here. If I were your President, I would levy a tax on you for living in San Francisco!

You can have very big local government. By big, I mean very engaged government. Do you measure it in terms of the number of laws? Number of employees? You could make arguments for either one. I tend to think the axis of the size of government is the wrong concern. But I do think that situating power more locally is a legitimate approach.

Modern nature-worship is all upside down. Trees and fields ought to be the ordinary things; terraces and temples ought to be extraordinary. I am on the side of the man who lives in the country and wants to go to London.

The [Democratic] party's become an urban party, and they don't get rural America. They don't get agriculture.

The persons and property of our citizens are entitled to the protection of our government in all places where they may lawfully go.

[Political actions] has to happen on the local and state level; we have to convince our cities to join the growing number of more than 200 American cities who have signed on to the mayor's climate campaign.

Politics never takes a holiday in Chicago.

Our company has only been active in Beijing and Shanghai, two very market-dominated cities. This was an advantage. Land is purchased here in public auctions, in a transparent way. When you do real estate development outside Beijing and Shanghai it is good to have "guanxi" - good relations within the local government.

We don't need gold plated highways. We don't need zoning commissions which penalize offices at home and promote car commutes.

The District of Columbia is the one spot where there is no government for the people, of the people and by the people.

Those communal areas have got elected municipalities, which have got to do their work as, as fully, democratically elected municipal councils.

Our message will be that we're going to make federal government buildings a model - an energy-efficient model - and also start matching grants for cities and counties so that they can also do the same with their government buildings.

My dream in growing up in the city of Detroit was to be Mayor. At the family picnics from the time I was 9-years-old that's what I told people I was going to be. The mayor of the city of Detroit.

The suburban West is, from a moral perspective, depressing evidence that we have misused our freedom. There is, however, another aspect to the landscape, an unexpected glory. Over the cheap tracts and littered arroyos one sometimes see a light as clean as that recorded by O'Sullivan. Since it owes nothing to our care, it is an assurance; beauty is final.

The people want government that works for them at every level. They want good government that begins at their doorstep in the barangay, and does not end before the closed door of a bureaucrat in Metro Manila.

On human rights, civil rights and environmental quality, I consider myself to be very liberal. On the management of government, on openness of government, on strengthening individual liberties and local levels of government, I consider myself a conservative. And I don't see that the two attitudes are incompatible.

Chicago happened slowly, like a migraine. First they were driving through countryside, then, imperceptibly, the occasional town became a low suburban sprawl, and the sprawl became the city.

For the ANC to cry 'sabotage' the night before crucial local government elections shows just how desperate they are to disguise their incompetence and mismanagement.

I want to become Kiev's mayor because I love my city very much and want to improve life in it.

Most people just aren't clear-eyed about the rural South. We think that the urban centers are the problem, and the rural areas across the country are idyllic, suffused with good old American values, social values, religious values, moral values. It's what we tell ourselves to keep this political power structure in place, and it's what we see in pop culture, too.

One of the things that the Hillary Clinton campaign has done, I think all the mayors in America would agree, is have a detailed plan about how that money actually gets down to the ground fast.

I wouldn't vote for Ken Livingstone if he were running for mayor of Toytown.