Top 100 Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
#1. When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent. No faces, voices, nothing like that. It is like the world burst and flamed into life all around me. That is not a great image, but it is as good as I will ever do.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#3. In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn't developed space travel were mere prehistory
horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene
and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#4. Racist, sexist, and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion, education and exposure to the other guy's-or excuse me, woman's-point of view.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#5. While everything else in our lives has gotten simpler, speedier, more microwavable and user-friendly, child-raising seems to have expanded to fill the time no longer available for it.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#6. Without people around, furniture has nothing to do but bear witness to the structural inadequacies of the human body: How much padding, cushioning, embracing, enfolding, and supporting we had needed just to stumble about through our days!
Barbara Ehrenreich
#7. We can hardly pride ourselves on being the world's preeminent democracy, after all, if the large numbers of citizens spend half their waking hours in what amounts, in plain terms, to a dictatorship.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#8. From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8,000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#9. If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#10. Tonight, unhappy with your love, your job, your life, not enough money? Use your head. You can think yourself into a lot better you. Positive thoughts can transform, can attract the good things you know you want. Sound far-fetched? Think again. It's supported by science.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#11. I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#12. It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#13. We are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#14. In our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream - from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#15. A man who is a good lover to his wife is his children's best friend. ... Child care is play to a woman who is happy. And only a man can make a woman happy. In deepest truth, a father's first duty to his children is to make their mother feel fulfilled as a woman.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#16. Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#17. My parents were atheists, strong atheists. I never got the answer 'God.'
Barbara Ehrenreich
#18. As Eckhart, one of Otto's many sources, had asserted centuries earlier, referring to the Other as "God," the religious seeker must set aside "any idea about God as being good, wise, [or] compassionate.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#19. As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear line between entities to which science attributes mind and those it regards as mindless mechanisms.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#20. Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#21. My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan's life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#22. Just as welfare was said to "cause poverty," the experts may soon announce that Medicare causes baldness and that Social Security is a risk factor for osteoporosis: the correlations are undeniable.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#23. When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#24. Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#25. What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#26. Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#27. A cynic might conclude that the real purpose of the $500 million-a-year implant business is the implantation of fat in the bellies and rumps of underemployed plastic surgeons.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#28. Whether you work outside the home or not, never tell them [your children] that being a mommy is your 'job.' Being a mommy is a relationship, not a profession.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#29. It used to be almost the first question (just after 'Can you type?') in the standard female job interview: 'Are you now, or have you ever, contemplated marriage, motherhood, or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government?
Barbara Ehrenreich
#30. The Civil Rights Movement, it wasn't just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands - millions, I should say - of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their community.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#31. My father had been a copper miner, uncles and grandfathers worked in the mines for the Union Pacific. So to me, sitting at a desk all day was not only a privilege but a duty: something I owed to all those people in my life, living and dead, who'd had so much more to say than anyone ever got to hear.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#32. Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#33. Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's an appropriate subject for an 'ethic.'
Barbara Ehrenreich
#34. We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#35. Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#36. It's a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations ... Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#37. A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#38. The fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical 'name it and claim it' variety, in which the deity exists only to meet one's immediate, self-identified needs.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#39. A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.
Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America
Barbara Ehrenreich
#40. I'm interested in what bonds people together. You know, what brings us together in good ways? And there's not a lot known about that.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#41. If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#42. Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#43. You can talk about depression as a "chemical imbalance" all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist - a "demon," a "beast," or a "black dog," as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#44. The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#45. For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#46. The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#47. We - we spend a lot of time, scholarly time, thinking about love and sex, but very little about the - the kind of joy that can take over a crowd of people or a group of people, in festivity, in ecstatic ritual of some kind, in celebration.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#48. James Bond in his Sean Connery days ... was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter or a degenerate and did not eat out of cans.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#49. If you search the bible, you will find no reference to birth control or gay marriage, and you will not find a word, strangely, about stem cell research. I have searched.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#51. Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed the hungry or lift the fallen. Mercy is left entirely to us.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#52. Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#53. Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#54. We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#55. mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother's explanations of veal: I was being recruited into the great death march of biology - be born, reproduce, die.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#56. Get up and make notes on the books that you have, reflect on these notes and order more books, get up again, revise the hypothesis, and figure out a new plan of action. Repeat, making sure to leave no cracks open through which the gray fog of depression can penetrate. I
Barbara Ehrenreich
#57. To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#58. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#59. Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#60. That's the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#61. According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in today's churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#62. Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#63. Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#64. I spent the first few months of graduate school pretending to be a student of theoretical physics. This required no great acting skill beyond the effort to appear unperturbed in the face of the inexplicable, which is as far as I can see one of the central tasks of adulthood.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#65. Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#66. Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#67. Life is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#68. Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#69. The religions that fascinate me and, you know, could possibly tempt me are not the ones that involve faith or belief. They're the ones that offer you the opportunity to know the spirit or deity.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#70. So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#71. War cannot be used as a means to prevent or abolish wars ... The idea of a war to prevent war is one of its oldest, and cruelest, tricks.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#72. To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born "illegals."
Barbara Ehrenreich
#73. Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#74. A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the laws.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#75. According to a recent poll [ ... ] 94% of Americans agree that people who work fulltime should be able to earn enough to keep their families out of poverty.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#76. That's what "meaning" is - a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#77. The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#78. That's what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner - or more sociable - than that?
Barbara Ehrenreich
#79. An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not - and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it's microbes. They're the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#80. The Republicans hardly need a party and the cumbersome cadre of low-level officials that form one; they have a bankroll as large as the Pentagon's budget, dozens of fatted PACs, and the well-advertised support of the Christian deity.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#81. Feminists have not tried to "destroy the family". We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#82. For a long time on Earth humans didn't worship good gods; that's a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#83. Yes. I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#84. Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#85. My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#86. Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?
Barbara Ehrenreich
#87. I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#88. I became a student of the history of religion. I am fascinated by how religions often center on mystical experience, and in the Old Testament tradition you find flames, the burning bush.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#89. Our atheism family tradition is traced to a - I don't know if it was great-great or a great-great-great grandmother who was a poor Irish-American woman in the 1880s in western Montana.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#90. Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, "Adoption, not Abortion," although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#91. When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#92. Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#93. Sometimes writing is pure hell. I'll write something and look at it in a few hours and say, "This is crap. What will I do with my life? I'll never write again." It's a bipolar business, and you bounce back. You become gripped with some new insight that shows the way.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#94. Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we've made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we've loved it to death.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#95. Our great common challenge ... is to free people from religion, get it out of our laws, our schools, our health systems, our government and, I would add, also our sporting events. I would really like to see some separation of church and stadium, if we could work on that.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#96. The secret of the truly successful, I believe, is that they learned very early in life how not to be busy. They saw through that adage, repeated to me so often in childhood, that anything worth doing is worth doing well.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#98. I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#99. So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#100. If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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