Quotes from Robert B Reich

They found that flights with a first-class section were nearly four times more likely to have incidents of "belligerent behavior" or "emotional outbursts" in their economy class. Such incidents were even more likely when economy passengers had to walk through the first-class section to get to their seats than when they entered through the middle of the plane and bypassed the first-class section.

A concern for the common good—keeping the common good in mind—is a moral attitude. It recognizes that we're all in it together. If there is no common good, there is no society.

Leadership must entail trusteeship. Leaders are stewards of the unwritten rules we once took for granted, that constituted 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.

I know it's hard to imagine, but even a president of the United States could act like Shkreli

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.

Figure out for yourself what you want to be really good at, know that you'll never really satisfy yourself that you've made it, and accept that that's okay

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.

I believe we're bound together by the ideals and principles we share, and the mutual obligations those principles entail.

Education is a public good that builds the capacity of a nation to wisely govern itself, and promotes equal opportunity.

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.