335 Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

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

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.

Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.

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

At Wal-Mart, a co-worker once advised me that, although I had a lot to learn, it was also important not to "know too much," or at least never to reveal one's full abilities to management, because "the more they think you can do, the more they'll use you and abuse you." My mentors in these matters were not lazy; they just understood that there are few or no rewards for heroic performance. The trick lies in figuring out how to budget your energy so there'll be some left over for the next day.

When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.

Even healthy families need outside sources of moral guidance to keep those tensions from imploding--and this means, among other things, a public philosophy of gender equality and concern for child welfare. When instead the larger culture aggrandizes wife beaters, degrades women or nods approvingly at child slappers, the family gets a little more dangerous for everyone, and so, inevitably, does the larger world.

The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce. It creates a lot of anger and emotional hardship. People may become quite depressed.