in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
war has dug itself into economic systems, where it offers a livelihood to millions ... It has lodged in our souls as… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Historians differ on when the consumer culture came to dominate American culture. Some say it was in the twenties, when advertising became… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
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… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share
The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier.… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
Money does not bring happiness' - only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence. — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
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… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
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 Copy Share Image
Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
“Robert Jackall’s book [ Moral Mazes ] impressed on me that corporate dress serves a far more important function than mere body covering. “Proper management of one’s external appearances,” he writes, “simply signals to one’s superiors that one is prepared to undertake other kinds of self-adaptation.” By dressing correctly, right down to the accessories, you let it be known that… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share
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 Copy Share Image
Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of 'traditional values' installed. ... the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
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… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image
I became a student of the history of religion. I am fascinated by how religions often center on mystical experience, and in the Old… — Barbara Ehrenreich Copy Share Image