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Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

A child is not a salmon mousse. A child is a temporarily disabled and stunted version of a larger person, whom you will someday know. Your job is to help them overcome the disabilities associated with their size and inexperience so that they get on with being that larger person.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Crime seems to change character when it crosses a bridge or a tunnel. In the city, crime is taken as emblematic of class and race. In the suburbs, though, it's intimate and psychological - resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical industry, the AIDS problem has already been solved. After all, we already have a drug which can be sold at the incredible price of $8, 000 an annual dose, and which has the added virtue of not diminishing the market by actually curing anyone.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
If that's how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what's left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a whole bunch of cinders (one of which is, fortunately, still hot enough and close enough to be good for tanning).
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production - only to produce a race of bed-wetters!
– Barbara Ehrenreich
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.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world's total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
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.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
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.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
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.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
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.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
So why do people keep on watching? The answer, by now, should be perfectly obvious: we love television because television brings us a world in which television does not exist. In fact, deep in their hearts, this is what the spuds crave most: a rich, new, participatory life.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
That's free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing - the truly democratic thing about it - is that you don't even have to be a player to lose.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
The feminist anti-pornography movement, no less than the feminist movement of a century ago, encourages the assumption that male and female sexuality, and possibly morality, are as unlike as yin and yang.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
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.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
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?
– Barbara Ehrenreich
There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment - anywhere.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Those Romans who perpetrated the rape of the Sabines, for example, did not work themselves up for the deed by screening Debbie Does Dallas, and the monkish types who burned a million or so witches in the Middle Ages had almost certainly not come across Boobs and Buns or related periodicals.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Yes. 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.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
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.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Marriage is socialism among two people.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
If you can attribute your success entirely to your own mental effort, to your own attitude, to some spiritual essence that you have that is better than other people's, then that must feel pretty good.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
I have a Ph.D. in cell biology. And that's really manual labor. I mean, experimental science, you do it with your hands. So it's very different. You're out there in a lab, cleaning test tubes, and it just wasn't that fascinating.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
Experimental science is fascinating, but I don't want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I'll read about it.
– Barbara Ehrenreich
At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.
– Barbara Ehrenreich