William Greider Quotes

When self-important people and powerful institutions are governed by illusion, history has a way of biting back.

Our values are defined by what we will tolerate when it is done to others. Everyone's sense of virtue is degraded by the present reality. A revolutionary principle is embedded in the global economic system, awaiting broader recognition: Human dignity is indivisible. Across the distances of culture and nations, across vast gulfs of wealth and poverty, even the least among us are entitled to dignity, and no justification exists or brutalizing them in the pursuit of commerce.

People know elections, like television commercials, are not real.

Everyone's values are defined by what they will tolerate when it is done to others.

A profound political question is suddenly on the table: Must the country continue to give precedence to private financial gain and market determinism over human lives and broad public values?

Money is power in American politics. It always has been.

Democracy is held captive, not just by money, but by ideas - the ideas that money buys.

Creating a positive future begins in human conversation. The simplest and most powerful investment any member of a community or an organisation can make is to begin with other people as though the answers mattered.

The great multinationals are unwilling to face the moral and economic contradictions of their own behavior - producing in low-wage dictatorships and selling to high-wage democracies. Indeed, the striking quality about global enterprises is how easily free-market capitalism puts aside its supposed values in order to do business. The conditions of human freedom do not matter to them so long as the market demand is robust. The absence of freedom, if anything, lends order and efficiency to their operations.

Efficiency obliterates identity

Aside from sending someone to war or to prison, government s ability to make people involuntarily give over their money is its strongest exercise of authority over private citizens and their institutions.

Democracy begins in human conversation. A democratic conversation does not require elaborate rules of procedure or utopian notions of perfect consensus. What it does require is a spirit of mutual respect-people conversing critically with one another in an atmosphere of honesty and shared regard.

The present struggle seems less about abolishing big government than about who gets to use it.

Maybe the reason some folks lag behind in our free enterprise system is because they depend too much on the free part and not enough on their own enterprise.

If everyone has to be a watchdog in order to make government work, then the foxes will also volunteer to serve.

The point is, the political reporters are the ones who no longer understand the ritual they are covering. They keep searching for political meanings in the tepid events when a convention is now essentially a human drama and only that.

Obviously, people with low or even moderate incomes could not afford such savings rates, and even diligent savings from their low wages would not be enough to pay for either retirement or healthcare.

The economy is not governed with the bottom half in mind.

The brilliant creative core of capitalism ... is the story the entrepreneurs and capital investors tell themselves about the future. How they intend to alter it, what they expect to gain in return, where they will raise the capital to accomplish their vision. Many of their stories turn out to be flawed or mistaken, of course, but the capacity to envision a set of future events and then act to fulfill them is a central source of capitalism's strength and its dominance of society.

The burnt odor in Washington is from the disintegrating authority of the governing classes.

The problem of modern democracy is rooted in its neglect of unorganized people.

Everyone cares for disabled people, right? What they don't care for are genuine civil rights for disabled people. MARY JOHNSON tells the tortuous, enraging story of how Congress enacted a law that instead of protecting against discrimination has turned 'the disabled' into a political punching bag.

If one benefits tangibly from the exploitation of others who are weak, is one morally implicated in their predicament? Or are basic rights of human existence confined to the civilized societies that are wealthy enough to afford them? Our values are defined by what we will tolerate when it is done to others.

The threat to globalization is not the wasted American dollars but Washington's readiness to mix US commercial interests with its self-appointed role as global protector.

The rich nations of the world are acting like ancient usurers, lending money to the desperate poor on terms that cannot possibly be met and, thus, steadily acquiring more and more control over the lives and assets of the poor.