Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes

But Jesus makes his appearance here only as a corpse; the living man, the wine-guzzling vagrant and precocious socialist, is never once mentioned, nor anything he ever had to say. Christ crucified rules, and it may be that the true business of modern Christianity is to crucify him again and again so that he can never get a word out of his mouth.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Just as layoffs were making a mockery of the team concept, employees were urged to find camaraderie and a sense of collective purpose at the microlevel of the team. And the less teamlike the overall organization became with the threat of continuous downsizing, the more management insisted on individual devotion to these largely fictional units.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all. Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why retreat into anxious introspection when, as Emerson might have said, there is a vast world outside to explore? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

A hint of - dare I say? - animism has entered into the scientific worldview. The physical world is no longer either dead or passively obedient to the laws.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

In matters of the heart as well, a certain level of negativity and suspicion is universally recommended. You may try to project a thoroughly positive outlook in order to attract a potential boyfriend, but you are also advised to Google him.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The failure to think positively can weigh on a cancer patient like a second disease.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Happiness, after all, is generally measured as reported satisfaction with one's life - a state of mind perhaps more accessible to those who are affluent, who conform to social norms, who suppress judgment in the service of faith, and who are not overly bothered by societal injustice...The real conservatism of positive psychology lies in its attachment to the status quo, with all its inequalities and abuses of power. Positive psychologists' tests of happiness and well-being, for example, rest heavily on measures of personal contentment with things as they are.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

As a recent editorial in the Journal of Clinical Oncology put it: What we must first remember is that the immune system is designed to detect foreign invaders, and avoid out own cells. With few exceptions, the immune system does not appear to recognize cancers within an individual as foreign, because they are actually part of the self.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the 'negative people' from one's life? It might be a good move 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. And at the workplace, while it's probably advisable to detect and terminate those who show signs of becoming mass killers, there are other annoying people who might actually have something useful to say: the financial officer who keeps worrying about the bank's subprime mortgage exposure or the auto executive who questions the company's overinvestment in SUVs and trucks. Purge everyone who 'brings you down,' and you risk being very lonely, or, what is worse, cut off from reality.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

A lot of what we experience as strength comes from knowing what to do with weakness.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Most accounts of mystical experiences... insist that the Other in the encounter appears to be living or alive, as in living God. But is it alive in any biological sense? Does it eat and metabolize? Does it reproduce - an option that monotheism would seem to foreclose?

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

That's what meaning is—a special additive like salt or garlic that could make even the most fetid piece of meat seem palpable, even delicious.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Why revere the unknowable? Why not find out what it is?

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

If this was mental illness, or even just a particularly clinical case of adolescence, I was bearing up pretty well.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

But apparently you don't need dot-com wealth to ruin an area for its low-income residents. The Pioneer Press quotes Secretary of HUD Andrew Cuomo ruing the cruel irony that prosperity is shrinking the stock of affordable housing nationwide: The stronger the economy, the stronger the upward pressure on rents.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

She represents something about the corporate world that repel me, some deep coldness masked as relentless cheerfulness.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Somehow human authority is never enough, we must have special effects.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Too bad for any parent who has become accustomed to ruling by force, because at some point the kids just get too big to slap around.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The universe does not reveal itself to undergraduates or fools: This is the entire premise of higher education.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The impasse was this: If I let myself speculate even tentatively about that something, if I acknowledged the possibility of a nonhuman agent or agents, some mysterious Other, intervening in my life, could I still call myself an atheist?

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The Ten Commandments, for example, were no more challenging than the Girl Scout oath, and why should anyone be tempted to put one false god ahead of another?

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

My religious friends - and my friends were almost all Catholics or Protestants or occasionally something more exotic like Jewish or Greek Orthodox - were convinced that God had a plan for us, and since God was good, it was a good plan, which we were required to endorse even without having any idea what it was. Just sign the paperwork; in other words, don't overintellectualize.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Just now and then, maybe every few weeks and then only for minutes at a time, a breach appeared in the partition and I walked on through, because I have always taken that as a general rule of life: If a door opens, walk on through and at least take a look around.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

In books, coaching sessions, and networking events aimed at the white-collar unemployed, the seeker soon encounters ideologies that are explicitly hostile to any larger, social understanding of his or her situation. The most blatant of these, in my experience, was the EST-like, victim-blaming ideology represented by Patrick Knowles and the books he recommended to his boot-camp participants. Recall that at the boot camp, the timid suggestion that there might be an outer world defined by the market or ruled by CEOs was immediately rebuked; there was only us, the job seekers. It was we who had to change. In a milder form, the constant injunction to maintain a winning attitude carries the same message: look inward, not outward; the world is entirely what you will it to be.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

Human intellectual progress, such as it has been, results from our long struggle to see things 'as they are,' or in the most universally comprehensible way, and not as projections of our own emotions. Thunder is not a tantrum in the sky, disease is not a divine punishment, and not every death or accident results from witchcraft. What we call the Enlightenment and hold on to only tenuously, by our fingernails, is the slow-dawning understanding that the world is unfolding according to its own inner algorithms of cause and effect, probability and chance, without any regard for human feelings.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

I expected, as I approached the corporate world, to enter a brisk, logical, nonsense-free zone, almost like the military - or a disciplined, up-to-date military anyway - in its focus on concrete results. How else would companies survive fierce competition? But what I encountered was a culture riven with assumptions unrelated to those that underlie the fact- and logic-based worlds of, say science and journalism - a culture addicted to untested habits, paralyzed by conformity, and shot through with magical thinking.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

The most flattering spin I can put on this phase of paradoxes and metaphysical tangles is that I was smart enough, at age fourteen, to destroy any fledgling hypothesis I came up with. A tentative explanation, theory, or formulation would pop up in my brain only to be attacked by what amounted to a kind of logical immune system, bent on eliminating all that was weak or defective. Which is to say that my mind had become a scene of furious predation, littered with the half-eaten corpses of vast theories and brilliant syntheses.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

In fact, the idea of a God who is both all-powerful and all good is a logical impossibility.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders--orders which are in this case self-generated.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

I understood that no one could have lobbed such a stinging wad of shame out into the world without having a considerable personal reserve of it to draw on.

~ 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

Once I stand and watch helplessly while some rug rat pulls everything he can reach off the racks, and the thought that abortion is wasted on the unborn must show on my face, because his mother finally tells him to stop.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

I don't think you have ever really inhabited a city until you have walked down the street and seen every single person, no matter how unlikely or different from yourself, how disheveled or foreign, as a potential ally or recruit.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Breast cancer, I can now report, did not make me prettier or stronger, more feminine or spiritual. What it gave me, if you want to call this a “gift,” was a very personal, agonizing encounter with an ideological force in American culture that I had not been aware of before—one that encourages us to deny reality, submit cheerfully to misfortune, and blame only ourselves for our fate.

~ Barbara Ehrenreich