Barbara Ehrenreich quotes - page 3

My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan's life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind. (Barbara Ehrenreich)
In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shi'ite fundamentalists. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won't cry when she's knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn't allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
There's more pressure on women to be chirpy and perky. View quote
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. View quote
Barbara 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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. (Barbara Ehrenreich)
A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
What these tests tell employers about potential employees is hard to imagine, since the "right" answers 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. At The Maids, a housecleaning service, I am given something called the "Accutrac personality test," which warns at the beginning that "Accutrac has multiple measures which detect attempts to distort or 'psych out' the questionnaire." Naturally, I "never" find it hard "to stop moods of self-pity," nor do I imagine that others are talking about me behind my back or believe that "management and employees will always be in conflict because they have totally different sets of goals." View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
Someone has to stand up for wimps. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. View quote
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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. (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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don't need to have hierarchy so much. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich
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. View quote
Barbara 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. View quote
Barbara Ehrenreich