Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

Hope is essential to any political struggle for radical change when the overall social climate promotes disillusionment and despair.

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

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.

Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Marriage is socialism among two people.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation... none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

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.

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

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.

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.

Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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

America is addicted to wars of distraction.

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.

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.

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

One of the major differences I see in the political climate today is that there is less collective support for coming to critical consciousness – in communities, in institutions, among friends.

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!

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.'

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.

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.

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.

The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce. It creates a lot of anger and emotional hardship. People may become quite depressed.

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

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

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.

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

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?

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.

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.

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

We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.

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