335 Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.

An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not - and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it's microbes. They're the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.

The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress." --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260.

I’m not a nice person.

Purge everyone who “brings you down,” and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality.

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.

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

My aim here was much more straightforward and objective – just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I’ve had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it’s not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.

In sci-fi convention, life-forms that hadn’t developed space travel were mere prehistory – horse-shoe crabs of the cosmic scene – and something of the humiliation of being stuck on a provincial planet in a galactic backwater has stayed with me ever since.