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Cynicism is the largest obstacle to social change. Cynicism is dangerous because people throw up their hands and say, Well it's not possible. Why should I even try?

Robert Reich

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Robert Reich
Age: 78
Born: 1946
Born: June 24
Economist
Former United States Secretary Of Labor
Political Scientist
Politician
University Teacher
Scranton
Pennsylvania
Robert Bernard Reich
Hands
Obstacle
Change
Largest
Wells
Cynicism
Well
Obstacles
Even
Throw
Trying
Dangerous
People
Possible
Social

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Most Americans stopped looking at what was happening through a variety of coping mechanisms - starting with women entering paid work and then everyone working longer hours and using their homes for raising equity and generating more money through debt. The typical household basically staved off the day of reckoning.
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The path to success used to be up and through an organization. Now the path to success is increasingly through self-promotion.
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Radical conservatives want to police bedrooms.
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Standing up to bullies is the hallmark of a civilized society.
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I think that it's difficult to talk about large questions of economics or social policy without understanding the building blocks of society. And those building blocks are organizations, the people who run them, and the people who work in them.
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When corporations get special handouts from the government, subsidies and tax breaks, it costs you. It means you have to pay more in taxes to make up for these hidden expenses, and government has less money for good schools and roads, Medicare and national defense and everything else you need.
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Social change occurs when the gap between the ideals that people hold and the reality that they see every day gets too large.
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The silent majority really is a liberal majority, even though the word liberal has taken a real beating over the last 20 years by radical conservatives.
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Bill Clinton was a very, very good speaker. But like many people who are great speakers and great thinkers and have a lot of energy and ambition, he talked too much.
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Well-trained and dedicated employees are the only sustainable source of competitive strength.
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And now we're suffering the logical culmination of all this: the largest group of government-hati ng, racist, homophobic, misogynistic know-nothing, climate-change denying, evolution-denyi ng, science-denying , anti-immigrant House Republicans in history, bent on taking America back to the 19th century.
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One logical consequence of this New Economy composed of big brands and entrepreneurial groups is that the unit of production is no longer a particular, identical product. The unit of production is the creative individual.
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We reform the system. We save capitalism from its own excesses.
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In Washington, it's dog eat dog. In academia, it's exactly the opposite.
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Now, inventiveness and empathy, those qualities, if they're together in the same person, you've got an entrepreneurial genius. But they do tend to be slightly separate.
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The only sure way to stop excessive risk taking on Wall Street so you don't risk losing your job, or your savings or your home, is to put an end to the excessive economic and political power of Wall Street by busting up the big banks.
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The only way to grow the economy in a way that benefits the bottom 90 percent is to change the structure of the economy. At the least, this requires stronger unions and a higher minimum wage.
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I think that in politics, when people want to discredit a particular position, they say, Oh, they are liberals, or They are conservatives we are centrists. Everybody wants to be a centrist.
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You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring.
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I have found over the years that the most important way of getting people to relax is self-deprecating humor.
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