335 Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

I smoke. It's expensive. It's also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It's a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed.

[N]o matter how much effort we expend, not everything is potentially within our control, not even our own bodies and minds.[...] The body - or, to use more cutting-edge language, the "mindbody" - is not a smooth-running machine in which each part obediently performs its tasks for the benefits of the common good. It is at best a confederation of parts - cells, tissues, even thought patterns - that may seek to advance their own agendas, whether or not they are destructive of the whole.

Suppose that preventive care uncovered some condition that would require agonizing treatments or sacrifices on my part - disfiguring surgery, radiation, drastic lifestyle limitations. Maybe these measures would add years to my life, but it would be a painful and depleted life that they prolonged.

The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.

Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the "team". And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.

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?

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.

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.

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.