Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries,…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce. It creates a lot of…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

That's the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

I think it's tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don't happen to think it's…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“As far as I can see, even now, after years of puzzling over the field of cognitive science, there is no clear…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

It's even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stop mowing the lawn right…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding--and this means, among other things, a public…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“...I displayed, or usually displayed, all those traits deemed essential to job readiness: punctuality, cleanliness, cheerfulness, obedience. These are the qualities that…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Marx was wrong: It is not only the 'means of production' that shape societies, but the means of destruction. In our own…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move to…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“What I have to face is that 'Barb,' the name on my ID tag, is not exactly the same person as Barbara.…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

the fastest-growing brand of religion is of the magical 'name it and claim it' variety, in which the deity exists only to…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“According to a recent poll [...] 94% of Americans agree that "people who work fulltime should be able to earn enough to…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

James Bond in his Sean Connery days ... was the first well-known bachelor on the American scene who was not a drifter…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Personally, I can't see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“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

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

A cynic might conclude that the real purpose of the $500 million-a-year implant business is the implantation of fat in the bellies…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich