Top 100 Ehrenreich Quotes
#1. Barbara Ehrenreich is smart, provocative, funny, and sane in a world that needs more of all four.
Diane Sawyer
#2. The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress.
Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#3. Alden Ehrenreich is a drama nerd, and Alice Englert is indie girl. They're so cool in the way that our characters are cool.
Margaret Stohl
#4. Reading Ehrenreich is good for the soul.
Molly Ivins
#5. When I was a little kid, my parents would show me Marx Brothers' films and westerns and stuff like that. That's where all my desire to be an actor comes from and probably most of my understanding of acting comes from for sure.
Alden Ehrenreich
#6. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. I'm an obsessive. When I get a problem, a question in my mind, it can take me over.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#12. 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
#13. You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#14. 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
#15. 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
#16. The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#17. 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
#18. For me, the drive is storytelling. To be a part of an art that tells a story and to be a catalyst, a color in that, is very exciting.
Alden Ehrenreich
#19. The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?
Barbara Ehrenreich
#20. If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#21. 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
#22. I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#23. 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
#24. It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#25. Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production - only to produce a race of bed-wetters!
Barbara Ehrenreich
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. I haven't seen much socially redeeming about religion. I'm an atheist. I don't here want to get into the Hitchens- or Dawkins-style attack on religion. I was raised on that. It's boring.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#29. 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
#30. I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don't understand how she can go so long without food. "Well, I don't understand how you can go so long without a cigarette," she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#31. In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#32. An era that I specifically like is sort of late 50's, early 60's. I guess mid 50's too. I like these types of films that deal with post WWII America and this more complex leading man that kind of emerges from that.
Alden Ehrenreich
#33. In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#34. Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there's been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it's a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#35. 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
#36. My parents were atheists, strong atheists. I never got the answer 'God.'
Barbara Ehrenreich
#37. Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month's rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#38. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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
#41. 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
#42. If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#43. Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#44. 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
#45. In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#46. The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation ... none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#51. But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#52. That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#53. Marriage probably originated as a straightforward food-for-sex deal among foraging primates. Compatibility was not a big issue, nor, of course, was there any tension over who would control the remote.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#54. Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#55. 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
#56. I'm not questioning the monotheistic god. I think there's absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a god. When I say that, I mean I'm - part of that is that the idea that God could be all-powerful and also benevolent is on its face contradictory.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#57. In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#58. I feel about romance the same way I do about a vocation; it's a calling.
Alden Ehrenreich
#59. It was a very big principle in my upbringing that you should respect everybody's work. The street sweeper. Everybody. You should never look down on anybody for their work.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#60. In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#61. If they are ignored, [Alice] Callaghan worries, the dangers of handing the streets over to private security forces will only grow. 'Until they begin interfering with the rights of middle-class people,' she says, 'you won't have anybody crying about it. But by then, it will be too late.'
Ben Ehrenreich
#62. 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
#63. I want to make movies that people see. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do.
Alden Ehrenreich
#64. In 1993, 89 of the 'Fortune' top 100 companies were administering the Myers-Briggs test to their employees. The philosophy behind personality tests is that they don't want you to be in the wrong kind of job. The tests have been completely exposed as nonsense.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#65. 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
#66. The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#67. 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
#68. 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
#69. Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#70. I did my first film with Francis Ford Copploa which spoiled the hell out of me.
Alden Ehrenreich
#71. 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
#72. I think you always feel like you're about a hair's breadth away from being a bad actor anyway ... It's not too hard to let the rope go slack, so to speak.
Alden Ehrenreich
#73. At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#74. We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#75. 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
#76. The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#77. 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
#78. War is, in some not yet entirely defined sense, a self-replicating pattern of behavior, possessed of a dynamism not unlike that of living things.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#79. 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
#80. 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
#81. There hasn't been a serious life-style trend since the couch potato was sighted, in about 1986, on one of its rare forays to the video store. Cocooning remains a significant mass enterprise, encouraged by the availability of five hundred new cable channels and microwavable popcorn.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#82. 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
#83. I haven't worked enough to worry about getting typecast, but I do as a film lover didn't want to be working with the bad guys. I didn't want to be making a movie I thought was contributing to a lower base of movies that I just didn't think were helping people, really.
Alden Ehrenreich
#84. 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
#85. There's a lot of cruelty going on all the time, and I'm not just talking about inter-human cruelty. I'm talking about whole species becoming extinct, asteroids hitting planets, black holes gobbling up stars.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#86. 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
#87. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do. So I really want to be a part of those movies that say something good to a lot of people.
Alden Ehrenreich
#88. Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#89. Most accounts of mystical experiences ... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?
Barbara Ehrenreich
#90. 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
#91. The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#92. You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn't fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#93. The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#94. The early Christian patriarchs may not have realized that, in attempting to suppress ecstatic practices, they were throwing out much of Jesus too.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#95. I've definitely been spoilt. Every movie I've done, it's always the same criteria: finding a great story, and finding a great part to play.
Alden Ehrenreich
#96. 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
#97. The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#98. You can't go around telling people, 'I'm on a mission to discover the purpose of life.' Not if you're hoping to prolong the conversation.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#99. Something is wrong, very wrong, when a single person in good health, a person who in addition possesses a working car, can barely support herself by the sweat of her brow. You don't need a degree in economics to see that wages are too low and rents too high.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#100. No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
Barbara Ehrenreich
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