Barbara Ehrenreich Quotations

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I would never call myself a cancer survivor because I think it devalues those who do not survive. There's this whole mythology that people bravely battle their cancer and then they become survivors. Well, the ones who don't survive may be just as brave, you know, just as courageous, wonderful people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

I've spent so many years talking about poverty and economic justice, I'm strongly tempted to get biblical. Jesus' teachings are so radical; they're just insanely generous and apocalyptic. Christians become more fascinated by the dead Jesus. They don't like the living Jesus.

It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.

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.

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.

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.

The internet was supposed to make this whole business of job searching rational and simple. You could post your resume and companies would search them and they'd find you. It doesn't seem to work that way. There aren't enough jobs for experienced, college educated managers and professionals.

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.

I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I've written, but the next morning I see that it's crap. Then I start again - make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question.

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.

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.

I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them. If I am really ambitious, I pack books into boxes and donate them to prisons.

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

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.

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.

We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist.

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.

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.

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.

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. 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.

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 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.

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?

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.'

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

A research group found that 56 percent of major companies surveyed in the late '80s agreed that 'employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.' A decade later, only 6 percent agreed. It was in the '90s that companies started weeding people out as a form of cost reduction.

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.

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.

If I get incensed about some injustice, you can't make me - I will not just going to sit at my desk, at my computer all the time. I - I might want to march out on that.

If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other peoples, then that must feel pretty good.

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.

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

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

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

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.

As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.

I didn't want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn't love literature, but I couldn't distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.

I first started asking big questions when I was 12, and by big questions, I mean, 'Why are we here? What is this business? We're alive for a few short decades and then poof, we're out of here.'

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.

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.

People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don't expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don't want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.

When I was 13, I had these episodes where I could just see the world without any words attached to it, without any associations. It was a little bit spooky. A lot of people might have even thought it was pathological. I thought it was interesting.

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.

When the Somalians were merely another hungry third world people, we sent them guns. Now that they are falling down dead from starvation, we send them troops. Some may see in this a tidy metaphor for the entire relationship between north and south. But it would make a whole lot more sense nutritionally -- as well as providing infinitely more vivid viewing -- if the Somalians could be persuaded to eat the troops.

I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.

I went into science, ending up with a Ph.D. in cell biology, but along the way I found out that experimental science involves many hours and days and nights of laboratory work, which is a lot like washing dishes, only a little more challenging. I was too impatient, and maybe a little too sloppy, for it.

Some of us still get all weepy when we think about the Gaia Hypothesis, the idea that earth is a big furry goddess-creature who resembles everybody's mom in that she knows what's best for us. But if you look at the historical record - Krakatoa, Mt. Vesuvius, Hurricane Charley, poison ivy, and so forth down the ages - you have to ask yourself: Whose side is she on, anyway?

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

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.

Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.

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.

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?

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

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.

Then, in the 1980's, came the paroxysm of downsizing, and the very nature of the corporation was thrown into doubt. In what began almost as a fad and quickly matured into an unshakable habit, companies were 'restructuring,' 'reengineering,' and generally cutting as many jobs as possible, white collar as well as blue . . . The New York Times captured the new corporate order succinctly in 1987, reporting that... 'All such allegiances are viewed as expendable under the new rules. With survival at stake, only market leadership, strong profits and a high stock price can be allowed to matter'.

Once you do lose a job, there are not a lot of social supports for you. You lose health insurance because we have this absurd system in America where health insurance is usually tied to employment. Your income dips. And that's when you get into selling the house.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Marriage is socialism among two people.

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

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.

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.

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.

A free-enterprise economy depends only on markets, and according to the most advanced mathematical macroeconomic theory, markets depend only on moods: specifically, the mood of the men in the pinstripes, also known as the Boys on the Street. When the Boys are in a good mood, the market thrives; when they get scared or sullen, it is time for each one of us to look into the retail apple business.

I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: "Work hard and you'll get ahead" or "It's hard work that got us where we are." No one ever said that you could work hard - harder even than you ever thought possible - and still find yourself sinking ever deeper into poverty and debt.

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.

Call it 'nationalism' when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word 'patriotism' for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.

The secret of the truly successful ... is that they learned early in life how not to be busy.

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.

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

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.