Words matter. These are the best Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
I’m interested in what bonds people together. You know, what brings us together in good ways? And there’s not a lot known about that.
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
If I get incensed about some injustice, you can’t make me – I will not just going to sit at my desk, at my computer all the time. I – I might want to march out on that.
Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don’t need to have hierarchy so much.
We love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist.
The one regret I have about my own abortions is that they cost money that might otherwise have been spent on something more pleasurable, like taking the kids to movies and theme parks.
Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.
The internet was supposed to make this whole business of job searching rational and simple. You could post your resume and companies would search them and they’d find you. It doesn’t seem to work that way. There aren’t enough jobs for experienced, college educated managers and professionals.
Personally, I can’t see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.
Take motherhood: nobody ever thought of putting it on a moral pedestal until some brash feminists pointed out, about a century ago, that the pay is lousy and the career ladder nonexistent.
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
I haven’t read enough of the Bible. You know, I’m saving the Bible for if I ever get imprisoned, and the only reading material was the Bible.
For a long time on Earth humans didn’t worship good gods; that’s a new idea. The ancient Greek gods, the Hindu gods, are fairly amoral, most of them. We get stuck when we insist that God be both good and all-powerful.
We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
If there is something I am arguing, it is a critique of science. Science has consistently denied the existence of consciousness other than human. Only in the last 20 years do we have acknowledgement of animal feeling or culture or experience.
I know that the last thing a book wants is to just sit around unread, serving as an element of interior decorating. So when I have people over, all they have to do is glance at my books, and I implore them to take a few home with them. If I am really ambitious, I pack books into boxes and donate them to prisons.
Personally, I have nothing against work, particularly when performed, quietly and unobtrusively, by someone else. I just don’t happen to think it’s an appropriate subject for an ‘ethic.’
Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women’s liberation… none was more alarming, from a feminist point of view, than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.
In 1993, 89 of the ‘Fortune’ top 100 companies were administering the Myers-Briggs test to their employees. The philosophy behind personality tests is that they don’t want you to be in the wrong kind of job. The tests have been completely exposed as nonsense.
I think the anti-Wal-Mart is Costco, which pays much better and has much better health benefits and which is profitable and offers low prices.
Well, the first thing that clued me in to the fact that there was something really scary about breast cancer, way beyond the thought of dying, was coming across an ad in the newspaper for pink breast cancer teddy bears. I am not that afraid of dying, but I am terrified of dying with a pink teddy bear under my arm.
My death is incidental, and I worry very much about my loved ones and, you know, would like to make it as easy as possible for them. Or wish I could will away whatever, you know, the sadness they will feel when I die. But for me, nothing. The world goes on.
The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce.
I’m not questioning the monotheistic god. I think there’s absolutely no evidence for the existence of such a god. When I say that, I mean I’m – part of that is that the idea that God could be all-powerful and also benevolent is on its face contradictory.
That’s the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance.
I went into science, ending up with a Ph.D. in cell biology, but along the way I found out that experimental science involves many hours and days and nights of laboratory work, which is a lot like washing dishes, only a little more challenging. I was too impatient, and maybe a little too sloppy, for it.
So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
I’m not a nice person.
I routinely oscillate between exultation and despair. Maybe at the end of the day I feel pretty good about what I’ve written, but the next morning I see that it’s crap. Then I start again – make a new outline, do some more research, try to rethink the whole question.
There is the fear, common to all English-only speakers, that the chief purpose of foreign languages is to make fun of us. Otherwise, you know, why not just come out and say it?
I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.
I didn’t want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn’t love literature, but I couldn’t distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don’t expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don’t want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.
