As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.
Robert ReichRead
Freedom is the one value conservatives place above all others, yet time and again, their ideal of freedom ignores the growing imbalance of power in our society that's eroding the freedoms of most people.
Interpretation
This quote critiques the selective interpretation of freedom by conservatives, highlighting its inconsistency with social power dynamics.
Robert Reich's quote emphasizes that while conservatives may champion freedom as their foremost value, this ideal often overlooks the power imbalances that exist within society. He argues that such disparities undermine the freedoms and opportunities for the majority, suggesting that a true understanding of freedom must consider the equity of power among all individuals.
In practice
In a political debate focusing on civil rights and freedoms.
As we segregate by income into different communities, schools in lower-income areas have fewer resources than ever.
What 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.
My father would be very concerned about the environment. He'd be disappointed that we have hundreds of thousands and maybe even millions of people who are living out on the streets in the wealthiest nation on the planet. He'd be greatly disappointed because he would know that we can, and we must, do better.
A man of the world must seem to be what he wishes to be thought.
Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state, an intolerable one.
At the most we gaze at it in wonder, a kind of wonder which in itself is a form of dawning horror, for somehow we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.
Everyone - pantheist, atheist, skeptic, polytheist - has to answer these questions: 'Where did I come from? What is life's meaning? How do I define right from wrong and what happens to me when I die?' Those are the fulcrum points of our existence.
Monarchy is an outrage which even the blind of an entire people cannot justify... all men hold from nature the secret mission to destroy wherever it my be found. No man can reign innocently. The folly is too evident. Every king is a rebel and a usurper. Do kings themselves treat otherwise those who seek to usurp their authority?
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