335 Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

The "discovery" of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the "discovery" of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.

When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.

The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.

a great deal of the wealth at the top is built on the low-wage labor of the poor. Take Wal-Mart, our largest private employer and premiere exploiter of the working class. ... You think it's a coincidence that this union-busting low-wage retail empire happens to have generated a $65 billion family fortune?

A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness. Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America

Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, "Adoption, not Abortion," although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.

What you don't necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you're really selling is your life.

Jesus: a wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist.