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Charles A. Reich Quotes (1928-2019)
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About Charles A. Reich
Charles Alan Reich (20 May 1928 – 15 June 2019) was an American legal and social scholar and a Professor at Yale Law School famous as the author of the 1970 paean to the 1960s counterculture and youth movement, The Greening of America.
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“The end result of this personal and public impoverishment is a hollow man.”
“Innocence and optimism have one basic failing: they have no fundamental depth.”
“Technology has deprived the family of almost all its functions.”
“No person's gain in wisdom is diminished by anyone else's gain.”
“Once a person reaches Consciousness III, there is no returning to a lower consciousness.”
“The American dream was not, at least at the beginning, a rags-to-riches type of narrow materialism.”
“Perhaps the greatest and least visible form of impoverishment caused by the Corporate State is the destruction of community.”
“The presumed causes of Americas troubles can be summed up simply: the evils of unlimited competition, and abuses by those with economic power.”
“"there is every reason to fear that the State is growing ever more powerful, more autonomous, more indifferent to its own inhabitants."”
“Our history shows that what we must do is assert domination over the machine, to guide it so that it works for the values of our choice.”
“What looks like a man is only a representation of a man who does what the organization requires. He (or it) does not run the machine; he tends it.”
“One of the problems with fame … is they try to pigeonhole you… like I’m stuck with The Greening of America for the rest of my life.”
“America is dealing death, not only to people of other lands, but to its own people. So say the most thoughtful and passionate of our youth, from California to Connecticut.”
“Moreover, the human condition, if that is what it is, has been getting steadily worse in the Corporate State; more and more life-denying just as life should be opening up.”
“Surely this new age is not a repudiation of, but a fulfillment of, the American dream. What were the machines for, unless to give man a new freedom to choose how he would live?”
“Of all the qualities of human beings that are injured, narrowed, or repressed in the Corporate State, it is consciousness, the most precious and the most fragile, that suffers the most.”
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Charles A. Reich on Control 2 quotes
“The corporate state is an immensely powerful machine, ordered, legalistic, rational, yet utterly out of human control, wholly and perfectly indifferent to any human values.”
Charles A. Reich on Revolution
“There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act. It will not require violence to succeed, and it cannot be successfully resisted by violence. It is now spreading with amazing rapidity, and already our laws, institutions and social structure are changing in consequence. It promises a higher reason, a more human community, and a new and liberated individual. Its ultimate creation will be a new and enduring wholeness and beauty — a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land. This is the revolution of the new generation.”
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Daniel Schwartz on Charles A. Reich
“The book combines history, sociology, political science and prophecy. The first two-thirds of the book features a critique of modern American society and its consumerism and conformity. In that, it was far from unique. But Reich also wrote about three categories of consciousness. Consciousness I was the traditional self-reliant outlook of early America. It was replaced by the New Deal conformism of organizational society, Consciousness II. … It was Consciousness III, the counterculture of '60s youth, that attracted the most controversy. Reviews were mixed but mostly negative. For some reviewers, when it came to Consciousness III, Reich was politically naive and excessively romantic. He celebrated the hippie lifestyle and the use of psychedelic drugs. Marijuana "is a truth serum that repels false consciousness," Reich wrote. Reich was praised for capturing the spirit of the counterculture and struck a chord with parents by making it understandable and non-threatening. The book was written "with the rigour of an intellectual and the enthusiasm of a teenager," wrote law professor Rodger Citron in a 2007 biographical essay on Reich.”
About Charles A. Reich
Charles Alan Reich (20 May 1928 – 15 June 2019) was an American legal and social scholar and a Professor at Yale Law School famous as the author of the 1970 paean to the 1960s counterculture and youth movement, The Greening of America.