The Common Good Quotes

“Political victories that undermine trust in politics shouldn’t be considered victories; they’re net losses for society. Record corporate profits achieved by eroding the public’s trust in business aren’t successes; they’re derelictions of duty. Lobbying and campaign donations that result in laws and regulations favoring the lobbyists and donors aren’t triumphs if they weaken public confidence in our democracy; they, too, are abject failures of leadership.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“As Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said, everyone is entitled to their own opinions but not their own facts. He might have added that everyone is entitled to their own interpretations but not their own logic. When we accept lies as facts, or illogic as logic, we lose the shared reality necessary to tackle our common problems. We become powerless.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Both Madison and Thomas Jefferson were influenced by the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment philosopher Montesquieu, who defined a “republic” as a self-regulating political society whose mainspring was civic virtue.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Education is a public good that builds the capacity of a nation to wisely govern itself, and promotes equal opportunity.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“It is a central obligation of politicians as well as journalists, researchers, scientists, and academicians to inform the public of the truth, and to identify lies without fear of retribution. It is the civic responsibility of all of us to check the facts we read or hear, to find and depend upon reliable sources, to share the truth with others, and hold accountable those who lie to us or suppress the truth.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Some argue shareholder capitalism has proven to be more “efficient” than stakeholder capitalism. It has moved economic resources to where they’re most productive, and thereby enabled the economy to grow faster. By this view, stakeholder capitalism locked up resources in unproductive ways, CEOs were too complacent, corporations were too fat—employing workers they didn’t need, and paying them too much—and they were too tied to their communities. It is a tempting argument, but in hindsight a fallacious one. Any change that allows some people to become better off without causing others to be worse off is technically a more “efficient” use of resources. But when all or most of these efficiency gains go to a few people at the top—as has been the case since the 1980s—the common good is not necessarily improved. Just look at the flat or declining wages of most Americans, their growing economic insecurity, and the abandoned communities now littering the nation. Then look at the record corporate profits, soaring CEO pay, and jaw-dropping compensation on Wall Street. All Americans are stakeholders in the American economy, and most stakeholders have not done well.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“On the eve of the 2016 presidential election, only 18 percent of Americans said they trusted national news media, according to the Pew Research Center. In a Gallup poll at about the same time, nearly two-thirds of Americans believed the mainstream press was filled with “fake news.” Contrast this with American opinion almost five decades before. In 1972, in the wake of investigative reporting that revealed truths about Vietnam and Nixon’s Watergate scandal, 72 percent of Americans expressed trust and confidence in the press.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“In the 1970s only about 3 percent of retiring members of Congress went on to become Washington lobbyists. By 2016, fully half of all retiring senators and 42 percent of retiring representatives had turned to lobbying, regardless of party affiliation. This wasn’t because more recent retirees have had fewer qualms than their predecessors about making money off their contacts in government. It was because the financial rewards from corporate lobbying had ballooned. The revolving door rotates the other way, too: If a lobbyist can land a plum job in an administration, he or she becomes even more valuable on leaving. In his first six months as president, Trump handed control of every major regulatory agency to lobbyists from the industries they would oversee.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. “The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Democracy depends on citizens who are able to recognize the truth, analyze and weigh alternatives, and civilly debate their future, just as it depends on citizens who have an equal voice and equal stake in it. Without an educated populace, a common good cannot even be discerned. This is fundamental.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Patriotism based on the common good does not pander to divisiveness. True patriots don’t fuel racist or religious or ethnic divisions. They aren’t homophobic or sexist or racist. To the contrary, true patriots confirm the good that we have in common. They seek to strengthen and celebrate the “We” in “We the people.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Our core identity—the most precious legacy we have been given by the generations who came before us—is the ideals we share, the good we hold in common. If we are losing our national identity, it is not because we are becoming browner or speak in more languages than we once did. It is because we are losing our sense of the common good.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“What we have lost, I think, is a sense of our connectedness to each other and to our ideals—the America that John F. Kennedy asked that we contribute to.”
― Robert B. Reich, The Common Good

“the public good, the real welfare of the great body of the people, is the supreme object to be pursued; and that no form of government whatever has any other value than as it may be fitted for the attainment of this object.”
― Robert B. Reich, The Common Good

“We can help restore the common good by striving for it and showing others it’s worth the effort.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“But in modern America we often shame the wrong people. Instead of deterring behavior that undermines the common good, shame is too often deployed against people who don’t fit in—to ostracize them even further.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“By 2016, the typical American household had a net worth 14 percent lower than the typical household in 1984, while the richest one-tenth of 1 percent owned almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent put together. Income has become almost as unequal as wealth: Between 1972 and 2016 the pay of the typical American worker dropped 2 percent, adjusted for inflation, although the American economy nearly doubled in size. Most of the income gains went to the top.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“I know it’s hard to imagine, but even a president of the United States could act like Shkreli”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Rand, Nozick, and their more modern incarnations are dangerously wrong. Not only does the common good exist, but it is essential for a society to function. Without voluntary adherence to a set of common notions about right and wrong, daily life would be insufferable. We would be living in a jungle where only the strongest, cleverest, and most wary could hope to survive. This would not be a society. It wouldn’t even be a civilization, because there would be no civility at its core.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“The idea of “the common good” was once widely understood and accepted in America. After all, the U.S. Constitution was designed for “We the people” seeking to “promote the general welfare”—not for “me the selfish jerk seeking as much wealth and power as possible.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“I believe we’re bound together by the ideals and principles we share, and the mutual obligations those principles entail.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Our compact is not just with those who are alive today. It’s also with those who have come before us and those yet to be born. To the founding fathers, the Constitution and our system of government established a moral bond connecting generations. “There seems…to be some foundation in the nature of things, in the relation which one generation bears to another, for the descent of obligations from one to another,”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Is there no virtue among us?” asked James Madison, rhetorically. “If there be not, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“But as the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr once said, “Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Two years of required public service would give young people an opportunity to learn civic responsibility by serving the common good directly. It should be a duty of citizenship. This is how we once regarded military service.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, a woman was said to have asked Benjamin Franklin what sort of government the delegates had created for the people. He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” What did “keeping it” require? More than anything else, education. “Ignorance and despotism seem made for each other,” Jefferson warned. But if the new nation could “enlighten the people generally…tyranny and the oppressions of mind and body will vanish, like evil spirits at the dawn of day.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Public shaming can also carry a painful stigma. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” wrote Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration of Independence who also sought to put an end to public stocks and whipping posts.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“Hugh Heclo relates a speech given by Chicago Cub Ryne Sandberg when he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2005: “I was in awe every time I walked onto the field,” Sandberg said. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. Make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases; hit a home run, put your head down, drop the bat, run around the bases, because the name on the front is a lot more important than the name on the back.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“None of this is simply a matter of “ethics.” Ethics involves fulfilling legal responsibilities, avoiding obvious conflicts of interest, and behaving in an aboveboard manner. As now routinely taught in graduate schools of business and as required for obtaining many professional licenses, ethics is about how to avoid legal troubles or public relations disasters. Leadership as trusteeship extends way beyond ethics. It goes to the heart of the job. It requires a different way of thinking about the central obligation of leading any institution.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good

“As The New York Times editorial board put it in June 2017, “For Mr. Trump and his circle, what matters is not what’s right but what you can get away with. In his White House, if you’re avoiding the appearance of impropriety, you’re not pushing the boundaries hard enough. Government ethics officials say dealing with this administration is an exhausting game of whack-a-mole: go after one potential violation, and two others crop up. That’s because ethical regulations were not written with this sort of administration in mind.”
― Robert B Reich, The Common Good