As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.
Average working people need more fresh starts. Big corporations, banks, and Donald Trump need fewer.
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote emphasizes the need for working individuals to have opportunities for new beginnings while highlighting that established institutions require stability.
Robert Reich's quote suggests that average working people often face challenges that necessitate new beginnings or opportunities to improve their circumstances. In contrast, larger entities like corporations and influential figures like Donald Trump usually operate under conditions of stability, where fewer structural changes are favorable. This reflects a broader dialogue about economic inequality and the need for systemic reforms to give individuals more agency in their lives.
Themes
In practice
Example use cases
Using this quote in a motivational speech aimed at those looking to change their life circumstances.
More from Robert Reich
All quotes βWhat are called 'public schools' in many of America's wealthy communities aren't really 'public' at all. In effect, they're private schools, whose tuition is hidden away in the purchase price of upscale homes there, and in the corresponding property taxes.
What someone is paid has little or no relationship to what their work is worth to society.
Tax laws favor capital over labor, giving capital gains a lower rate than ordinary income. The rich get humongous mortgage interest deductions while renters get no deduction at all.
The dirty little secret is that both houses of Congress are irrelevant. ... America's domestic policy is now being run by Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve, and America's foreign policy is now being run by the International Monetary Fund [IMF]. ...when the president decides to go to war, he no longer needs a declaration of war from Congress.
You can't inspire people if you are going to be uninspiring.
Similar quotes
People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged.
But the beginning of things, of a world especially, is necessarily vague, tangled, chaotic, and exceedingly disturbing. How few of us ever emerge from such beginning! How many souls perish in its tumult!
I have wanted everything as a writer and a woman, but most of all a world changed utterly by my revelations.
To survive and succeed, every organization will have to turn itself into a change agent
Future generations, if there is a livable world for them, _x000D_ will look back at the epochal transition we are making to a life-sustaining society. _x000D_ And they may well call this _x000D_ the time of the Great Turning.
Revolution is not something fixed in ideology, nor is it something fashioned to a particular decade. It is a perpetual process embedded in the human spirit.