Barbara Ehrenreich famous quotes

We need to brace ourselves for a struggle against terrifying obstacles...bot h of our own making and imposed by the natural world. And the first step is to recover from the mass delusion that is positive thinking.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Struggle #Positive Thinking #Steps

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

#Patriotism #Matter #Hell

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

#Positive Thinking #Thinking #Differences

Marriage is socialism among two people.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Eugenics #Two #People

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

#Abortion #Adoption #Use

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

#Our Society #Facts #Poor

When someone works for less pay than she can live on -- when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently -- than she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made of a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Sacrifice #Example #Pay

There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Fun #Purpose #Why Not

Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a pink teddy bear under my arm.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Cancer #Scary #Dying

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

#Numbers #America #Debt

Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Men #Long #Coercion

Upscale people are fixated with food simply because they are now able to eat so much of it without getting fat, and the reason they don't get fat is that they maintain a profligate level of calorie expenditure. The very same people whose evenings begin with melted goats cheese... get up at dawn to run, break for a mid-morning aerobics class, and watch the evening news while racing on a stationary bicycle.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Running #Morning #Food

If men were equally at risk from this condition - if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains - then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Pregnancy #Fighting #Men

Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed. ... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Class #Down And #Rich

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

#Doe #Absence #Endure

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

#Love #Heart #People

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

#Innovation #Stranger #Public Speaking

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

#Jobs #Children #Home

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

#Dream #Thinking #Optimism

One of the most essential and mundane of human activities - taking care of children - requires high levels of anxious vigilance. ... [Parents] dare not risk assuming that the sudden quiet from the toddlers' room means they are studying with Baby Einstein. Visualize fratricidal stranglings and electric outlets stabbed with forks: this is how we have reproduced our genomes.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Baby #Children #Mean

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

#Taken #Class #White

In a process that had begun in the 1980s and suddenly accelerated in the early 2000s ... [t]he peaks of great wealth grew higher, rising up beyond the clouds, while the valleys of poverty sank lower into perpetual shadow. The once broad plateau of the middle class eroded away into a narrow ledge, with the white-knuckled occupants holding on for dear life.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Clouds #Class #White

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

#Love #Hate #Generosity

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

#Ideas #Long #Gone

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

#Sex #Issues #Foraging

We [on the left] have to be used to being a minority -- a small minority -- for some time to come. The odd thing is that the right, even when it is in power, likes to think of itself as an embattled minority against this elite that somehow runs everything. Whereas the left, even when it has no power at all, likes to imagine it somehow represents the majority of people. These are mirror-image delusions.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Running #Thinking #Mirrors

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

#Jobs #Children #Inexperience

Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won't cry when she's knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn't allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Men #Play #Trying

The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Labels #Cadillacs #Parks

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

#Children #Friendly #User Friendly

By the Reagan era, the 'culture of poverty' had become a cornerstone of conservative ideology: poverty was caused not by low wages or a lack of jobs but by bad attitudes and faulty lifestyles. The poor were dissolute, promiscuous, prone to addiction and crime, unable to 'defer gratification' or possibly even set an alarm clock. The last thing they could be trusted with was money.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Jobs #Attitude #Addiction

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

#War #Self #Patterns

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

#War #Warrior #Endless

Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#War #Generations #May

However and wherever war begins, it persists, it spreads, it propagates itself through time and across space with the terrifying tenacity of a beast attached to the neck of living prey. This is not an idly chosen figure of speech. War spreads and perpetuates itself through a dynamic that often seems independent of human will. It has, as we like to say of things we do not fully understand, 'a life of its own.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#War #Independent #Space

The money that fueled the explosion of gluttony at the top had to come from somewhere or, more specifically, from someone. Since no domestic oil deposits had been discovered, no new seams of uranium or gold, and since the war in Iraq enriched only the military contractors and suppliers, it had to come from other Americans.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Military #War #Oil

no job, no matter how lowly, is truly 'unskilled.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Jobs #Work #Matter

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

#Work #Motherhood #Leader

As a general rule, when something gets elevated to apple-pie status in the hierarchy of American values, you have to suspect that its actual monetary value is skidding toward zero. 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. Same thing with work: would we be so reverent about the 'work ethic' if it wasn't for the fact that the average working stiff's hourly pay is shrinking, year by year ...
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Zero #Work #Motherhood

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

#Jobs #Motherhood #Government

Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#War #Distance #Class

There is a reason why America produced the most vigorous feminist movement in the world: We were one of the only countries in which the middle class (which is wealthy by world standards) customarily employed its own women as domestic servants.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Country #Class #America

war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions ... It has lodged in our souls as a kind of religion, a quick tonic for political malaise and a bracing antidote to the moral torpor of consumerist, market-driven cultures.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#War #Political #Soul

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

#War #World #Produce

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

#America #Prison #Program

I realize that after decades of positive thinking the notion of realism, of things as they are, may seem a little quaint. ... When the stakes are high enough and the risks obvious, we still turn to people who can be counted on to understand those risks and prepare for worst-case scenarios. A chief of state does not want to hear a general in the field say that he 'hopes' to win tomorrow's battle or that he's 'visualizing victory' ...
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Positive Thinking #Winning #Reality

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

#School #Government #Law

the seeker who embraces positive theology finds ... that you can have all that stuff in the mall, as well as the beautiful house and car, if only you believe that you can. But ... if you don't have all that you want, if you feel sick, discouraged, or defeated, you have only yourself to blame. Positive theology ratifies and completes a world without beauty, transcendence, or mercy.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Beautiful #Believe #Sick

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

#Self #Names #Needs

a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class. ... You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $65 billion family fortune?
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Thinking #Class #Retail

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

#Sex #Men #People

When television families aren't gathered around the kitchen table exchanging wisecracks, they are experiencing brief but moving dilemmas, which are handily solved by the youngest child or by some cute extraterrestrial houseguest. Emerging from Family Ties or My Two Dads, we are forced to acknowledge that our own families are made up of slow-witted, emotionally crippled people who would be lucky to qualify for seats in the studio audience of JEOPARDY!
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Cute #Children #Dad

The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Country #Military #War

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

#War #Mean #Ideas

Marx was wrong: It is not only the 'means of production' that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own time, the costs of war, or just war readiness, are daunting. ... The resulting cost squeeze has led to a new type of society, perhaps best terms a 'depleted' state, in which the military has drained reources from all other social functions.
-- Barbara Ehrenreich

#Military #War #Mean

... 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

#Availability #Style #Popcorn