Barbara Ehrenreich

“Just as welfare was said to "cause poverty," the experts may soon announce that Medicare causes baldness and that Social Security is…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Without people around, furniture has nothing to do but bear witness to the structural inadequacies of the human body: How much padding,…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“If anyone can testify credibly to the decline of the American dream, it is the white-collar unemployed—the people who “played by the…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

One of the most essential and mundane of human activities - taking care of children - requires high levels of anxious vigilance.…

— 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

“Almost everyone smokes as if their pulmonary well-being depended on it — the multinational mélange of gooks; the dishwashers, who are all…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“It was doubtless true,” she later wrote “that I was ‘Weary of myself and sick of asking What I am and what…

— 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

“mostly I saw her efforts to induct me into adulthood much as a calf might see its mother’s explanations of veal: I…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Everyone in yuppie-land — airports, for example — looks like a nursing baby these days, inseparable from their plastic bottles of water.…

— 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

The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

You still don't like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend the economist Julianne Malveaux says: Don't marry a gay…

— 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

Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging…

— 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

“Morality, as far as I could see, originates in atheism and the realization that no higher power is coming along to feed…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

When I was 17, I had an experience that I later learned could be called a 'mystical experience.' It was almost violent.…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

I grew up hearing over and over, to the point of tedium, that "hard work" was the secret of success: "Work hard…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

“But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm - a bland and neutral mainstream…

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich