Ehrenreich Quotes & Sayings

There hasn't been a serious life-style trend since the couch potato was sighted, in about 1986, on one of its rare forays to the video store. Cocooning remains a significant mass enterprise, encouraged by the availability of five hundred new cable channels and microwavable popcorn. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

We do not know what is being done in our name. Worse, we do not ask. — Ben Ehrenreich

There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can't put up the two months' rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can't save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store. — Barbara Ehrenreich

To draw for a moment from an entirely different corner of my life, that part of me still attached to the biological sciences, there is ample evidence that animals - rats and monkeys, for example - that are forced into a subordinate status within their social systems adapt their brain chemistry accordingly, becoming 'depressed' in humanlike ways. Their behavior is anxious and withdrawn; the level of serotonin (the neurotransmitter boosted by some antidepressants) declines in their brains. And - what is especially relevant here - they avoid fighting even in self-defense ... My guess is that the indignities imposed on so many low-wage workers - the drug tests, the constant surveillance, being 'reamed out' by managers - are part of what keeps wages low. If you're made to feel unworthy enough, you may come to think that what you're paid is what you are actually worth. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

In fact the "mask" theme has come up several times in my background reading. Richard Sennett, for example, in "The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism", and Robert Jackall, in "Moral Mazes: The World of Corporate managers", refer repeatedly to the "masks" that corporate functionaries are required to wear, like actors in an ancient Greek drama. According to Jackall, corporate managers stress the need to exercise iron self-control and to mask all emotion and intention behind bland, smiling, and agreeable public faces.
Kimberly seems to have perfected the requisite phoniness and even as I dislike her, my whole aim is to be welcomed into the same corporate culture that she seems to have mastered, meaning that I need to "get in the face" of my revulsion and overcome it. But until I reach that transcendent point, I seem to be stuck in an emotional space left over from my midteen years: I hate you; please love me. — Barbara Ehrenreich

If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn't give a damn. — Barbara Ehrenreich

If you search the bible, you will find no reference to birth control or gay marriage, and you will not find a word, strangely, about stem cell research. I have searched. — Barbara Ehrenreich

When our children are old enough, and if we can afford to, we send them to college, where despite the recent proliferation of courses on 'happiness' and 'positive psychology,' the point is to acquire the skills not of positive thinking but of *critical* thinking, and critical thinking is inherently skeptical. The best students
and in good colleges, also the most successful
are the ones who raise sharp questions, even at the risk of making a professor momentarily uncomfortable. Whether the subject is literature or engineering, graduates should be capable of challenging authority figures, going against the views of their classmates, and defending novel points of view. — Barbara Ehrenreich

You can't go around telling people, 'I'm on a mission to discover the purpose of life.' Not if you're hoping to prolong the conversation. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Thus will the fondest dream of Phallic science be realized: a pristine new planet populated entirely by little boy clones of great scientific entrepreneurs free to smash atoms, accelerate particles, or, if they are so moved, build pyramids
without any social relevance or human responsibility at all. — Barbara Ehrenreich

It used to be almost the first question (just after 'Can you type?') in the standard female job interview: 'Are you now, or have you ever, contemplated marriage, motherhood, or the violent overthrow of the U.S. government? — Barbara Ehrenreich

I've definitely been spoilt. Every movie I've done, it's always the same criteria: finding a great story, and finding a great part to play. — Alden Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I would say that it's mainly about the director. It's a hard quality to find, but I always know whether I want to do something or not. The character is important to me, as is getting to work with people that I feel like I can learn from and make a great movie with. — Alden Ehrenreich

If men were equally at risk from this condition - if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains - then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies. — 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 and rumps of underemployed plastic surgeons. — Barbara Ehrenreich

WITCHES LIVED AND WERE BURNED LONG BEFORE the development of modern medical technology. The great majority of them were lay healers serving the peasant population, and their suppression marks one of the opening struggles in the history of man's suppression of women as healers. The other side of the suppression of witches as healers was the creation of a new male medical profession, under the protection and patronage of the ruling classes. This new European medical profession played an important role in the witch hunts, supporting the witches' persecutors with "medical" reasoning: — Barbara Ehrenreich

In today's world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Tonight, unhappy with your love, your job, your life, not enough money? Use your head. You can think yourself into a lot better you. Positive thoughts can transform, can attract the good things you know you want. Sound far-fetched? Think again. It's supported by science. — Barbara Ehrenreich

America is addicted to wars of distraction. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying ... we shopped till we dropped, all right, face down on the floor. — Barbara Ehrenreich

In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The aspect of kind of living in your imagination and creating a more romantic vision of the world than the reality that you're given - that's definitely something I can sort of relate to. — Alden Ehrenreich

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

You might discover that, nationwide, America's food banks are experiencing 'a torrent of need which [they] cannot meet' and that, according to a survey conducted by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, 67 percent of the adults requesting emergency food aid are people with jobs. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

In fact, if you're not prepared to die when you're almost sixty, then I would say you've been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The Republicans hardly need a party and the cumbersome cadre of low-level officials that form one; they have a bankroll as large as the Pentagon's budget, dozens of fatted PACs, and the well-advertised support of the Christian deity. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Memory,' wrote the Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury, is a process of organizing what to forget. — Ben Ehrenreich

Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others. — 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 mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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 people's, then that must feel pretty good. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The less sophisticated of my forbears avoided foreigners at all costs, for the very good reason that, in their circles, speaking in tongues was commonly a prelude to snake handling. The more tolerant among us regarded foreign languages as a kind of speech impediment that could be overcome by willpower. — Barbara Ehrenreich

But apparently yoiu don't need dot-com wealth to ruin an area for its low-income residents. The Pioneer Press quotes Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo ruing the "cruel irony" that prosperity is shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide: "The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are. — Barbara Ehrenreich

A man who is a good lover to his wife is his children's best friend. ... Child care is play to a woman who is happy. And only a man can make a woman happy. In deepest truth, a father's first duty to his children is to make their mother feel fulfilled as a woman. — Barbara Ehrenreich

As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self. — 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 meet one's immediate, self-identified needs. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs — Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do. So I really want to be a part of those movies that say something good to a lot of people. — Alden Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

I couldn't help noticing that the existential space in which a friend had earnestly advised me to 'confront [my] mortality' bore a striking resemblance to the mall. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders
orders which are in this case self-generated. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The war with Iraq ... had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

That's what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner - or more sociable - than that? — Barbara Ehrenreich

There can be no more ancient and traditional American value than ignorance. English-only speakers brought it with them to this country three centuries ago, and they quickly imposed it on the Africans
who were not allowed to learn to read and write
and on the Native Americans, who were simply not allowed. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done? — Barbara Ehrenreich

The advice that you must change your environment - for example, by eliminating negative people and news - is an admission that there may in fact be a "real world" out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only "positive" response is to withdraw into one's own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The obvious liberal rejoinders come to mind: What about the child whose home is hit by a bomb? Did she have some bomb-shaped thoughtform that brought ruin down on her head? And did my [fired white-collar workers] boot-camp mates cause the layoffs that drove them out of their jobs by "vibrating" at a layoff-related frequency? It seems inexcusably cruel to tell people who have reach some kind of personal nadir that their probem is entirely of their own making ... — Barbara Ehrenreich

We don't usually talk about American nationalism, but it is a mark of how deep it runs that we apply the word "nationalism" to Serbs, Russians, and others, while believing ourselves to possess a uniquely superior version called — Barbara Ehrenreich

If we want developed societies with women doctors, political leaders, teachers, bus drivers, and computer programmers, we will need qualified people to give loving care to their children. And there is no reason why every society should not enjoy such loving paid child care. — Barbara Ehrenreich

As Louis Uchitelle has reported in the New York Times, many employers will offer almost anything - free meals, subsidized transportation, store discounts - rather than raise wages. The reason for this, in the words of one employer, is that such extras "can be shed more easily" than wage increases when changes in the market seem to make them unnecessary.7 In the same spirit, automobile manufacturers would rather offer their customers cash rebates than reduced prices; the advantage of the rebate is that it seems like a gift and can be withdrawn without explanation. — 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, Dancing in the Streets, 260. — Barbara Ehrenreich

In fifteenth-century France, for example, one out of every four days of the year was an official holiday of some sort, usually dedicated to a mix of religious ceremonies and more or less unsanctioned carryings-on. Weddings, wakes, and other gatherings furnished additional opportunities for conviviality and carousing. Then there were the various local ceremonial occasions, such as the day honoring a village's patron saint or the anniversary of a church's founding ... So, despite the reputation of what are commonly called "the Middle Ages" as a time of misery and fear, the period from the thirteenth to the fifteenth century can be seen - at least in comparison to the puritanical times that followed - as one long outdoor party, punctuated by bouts of hard labor. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another? — Barbara Ehrenreich

Sometimes writing is pure hell. I'll write something and look at it in a few hours and say, "This is crap. What will I do with my life? I'll never write again." It's a bipolar business, and you bounce back. You become gripped with some new insight that shows the way. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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

I want to make movies that people see. I really think that movies are the most popular form of story telling ever and have such a huge impact on culture when they do. — Alden Ehrenreich

She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Most accounts of mystical experiences ... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be "living" or alive, as in "living God." But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose? — Barbara Ehrenreich

The early Christian patriarchs may not have realized that, in attempting to suppress ecstatic practices, they were throwing out much of Jesus too. — Barbara Ehrenreich

[T]he prime purpose of the occupation was not to take land or push people from their homes. It did that too of course, and effectively, but overall, with its checkpointed and its walls and its prisons and its permits, it functioned as a giant humiliation machine, a complex and sophisticated mechanism for the production of human despair. — Ben Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

For the record, my own loyalties are uncomplicated. I adore few humans more than I love books. I make no promises, but I do not expect to purchase a Kindle or a Nook or any of their offspring. I hope to keep bringing home bound paper books until my shelves snap from their weight, until there is no room in my apartment for a bed or a couch or another human being, until the floorboards collapse and my eyes blur to dim. But the book, bless it, is not a simple thing. — Ben Ehrenreich

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! — Barbara Ehrenreich

We were not supposed to know anything about our own bodies or to participate in decision-making about our own care. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

However we resolve the issue in our individual homes, the moral challenge is, put simply, to make work visible again: not only the scrubbing and vacuuming, but all the hoeing, stacking, hammering, drilling, bending, and lifting that goes into creating and maintaining a livable habitat. In an ever more economically unequal world, where so many of the affluent devote their lives to ghostly pursuits like stock trading, image making, and opinion polling, real work, in the old-fashioned sense of labor that engages hand as well as eye, that tires the body and directly alters the physical world tends to vanish from sight. The feminists of my generation tried to bring some of it into the light of day, but, like busy professional women fleeing the house in the morning, they left the project unfinished, the debate broken off in mid-sentence, the noble intentions unfulfilled. Sooner or later, someone else will have to finish the job. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Despair is not solid. Neither is joy. They alternate, and contain each other. There is no joy that is not also touched by sorrow, no grief that is not rendered sharper by the memory of bliss. If things move forward in one direction and not another, they do so by rolling there, passing through the same tight orbit, touching here an ecstasy, there another shattering loss. — Ben Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

If there was one thing I understood about God, it was that he was not good, and if he was good, he was too powerless to deserve our attention. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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

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? — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — 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

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Even when uttered by Democrats, "middle class" often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, "Us, and not them," where "them" includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues. — Barbara Ehrenreich

As a general rule, when something gets elevated to apple-pie status in the hierarchy of American values, you have to suspect that its actual monetary value is skidding toward zero. 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. Same thing with work: would we be so reverent about the 'work ethic' if it wasn't for the fact that the average working stiff's hourly pay is shrinking, year by year ... — Barbara Ehrenreich

With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star. — Barbara Ehrenreich

The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce. — Barbara Ehrenreich

Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors. — Barbara Ehrenreich

What these [personality] tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine since the 'right' answer should be obvious to anyone who has ever encountered the principle of hierarchy and subordination. Do I work well with others? You bet, but never to the point where I would hesitate to inform on them for the slightest infraction. Am I capable of independent decision making? Oh yes, but I know better than to let this capacity interfere with a slavish obedience to orders ... The real function of these tests, I decide, is to convey information not to the employer but to the potential employee, and the information being conveyed is always: You will have no secrets from us. We don't just want your muscles and that portion of your brain that is directly connected to them; we want your innermost self. — Barbara Ehrenreich

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