Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.

I had discovered that writing
with whatever instrument
was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.

Somehow human authority is never enough; we must have special effects.

Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.

We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care.

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.

With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.

The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.

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.

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.

Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards.

I'm an obsessive. When I get a problem, a question in my mind, it can take me over.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

Someone has to stand up for wimps.

In 2001, I was being treated for breast cancer, and I was pretty sure I was going to recover.

Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.

If there was one thing I understood about God, it was that he was not good, and if he was good, he was too powerless to deserve our attention.

I haven't read enough of the Bible. You know, I'm saving the Bible for if I ever get imprisoned, and the only reading material was the Bible.

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.

The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.

Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much.

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce.

If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.

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.

My parents were atheists, strong atheists. I never got the answer 'God.'

The early Christian patriarchs may not have realized that, in attempting to suppress ecstatic practices, they were throwing out much of Jesus too.

She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.

Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.

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.

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.

We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; "faith" a state of willed self-delusion.

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.

It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.

But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.

To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born "illegals."

There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky.

There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.

The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.

No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.

I'm not a nice person.

Marriage is socialism among two people.

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.

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.

Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others.

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.

Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.

It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.

Why "revere" the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

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

For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.

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.

Well, I certainly wouldn't want to live in the 18th century myself, or the 19th either, for that matter.

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.

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

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.

In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.

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.

So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.

In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.

To acknowledge the existence of other people is also to acknowledge that they are not reliable sources of safety or comfort.

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.

Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.

No job, no matter how lowly, is truly 'unskilled.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.