Robert Reich Quotes

Our democracy may have an aristocracy of talent, as Jefferson said – which is fine – but we don’t want everyone else to be left out. Something like that seems to be happening, though.

Capitalism and democracy are the opposite of each other. Capitalism is a system that guarantees that a few are going to do very well, and everybody else is going to serve the few. Democracy means everybody has a seat at the table. Everybody.

There is also an artificial aristocracy founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents;... The artificial aristocracy is a mischievous ingredient in government, and provision should be made to prevent its ascendancy.

I don't campaign for the end of the aristocracy or the upper classes; I don't really want to destroy anything at all. I just want more plurality.

There is no reason that billionaires should crowd us out from our democracy.

I'm a capitalist. I'm not going to feel sympathetic to people leading a life they don't have to lead who, with effort, could maybe break out of it.

Instead of an aristocracy of wealth, of more harm and danger than benefit, to society, and scattered with equal hand throughout all its conditions.

The top 1 percent have the best houses, the best educations, the best doctors, and the best lifestyles, but there is one thing that money doesn’t seem to have bought: an understanding that their fate is bound up with how the other 99 percent live. Throughout history, this is something that the top 1 percent eventually do learn. Too late.

There once was this powerful, both capital and political, class who cared about supporting and affirming a solid middle class in this country.

I don't think equality is intrinsically valuable, meaning in and of itself. I'm not against inequality... if Bill Gates gets another hundred million dollars, it's no skin off my nose.

Plainly elites in America don't want democracy. And why should they? Democracy is always harmful to elite interests. Almost by definition.

Luxury may possibly contribute to give bread to the poor; but if there were no luxury, there would be no poor.

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.

We need wealthy dogs off the seats of power. They're taking us back to feudalism and I really don't want that. But I'm very far from being a socialist.

If you get so unequal that people believe they don't have a chance, that the field isn't level for them and their children, that puts democracy at risk.

The American polity is infected with a serious imbalance of power between elites and masses, a power which is the principal threat to our democracy.

That a peasant may become king does not render the kingdom democratic.

You need just the right amount of protection for the rich under democracy: too little and the elite will not agree to democracy; too much and the poor will go ahead and have the revolution...

An imbalance between the rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.

The rich don’t want the poor to get ahead of them.

Middle-class democracy has proved the best camouflage of the political dominance of big capital.

There is no society, however free and democratic, where wealth will not create an aristocracy.

Economic growth has the marvelous quality of stilling discontent while maintaining privilege

The prime culprit in causing contemporary social inequality seems to be merit.