103 Quotes by Arlie Russell Hochschild

Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, brown pelicans – all have cut ahead of you in line. But it’s people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.

If the power elite want to forget about pollution, and if they impose structural amnesia on a community, you need an omnipotent mind to remember how things once were. You needed, the Arenos felt, God.

The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called ’advanced insecurity.

The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt.

The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman’s aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects.

We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.

But in Louisiana, the Great Paradox was staring me in the face – great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.

Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.

The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel – happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.