Quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

According to the historian William H. McNeil, European churches did not have pews until sometime in the eighteenth century. People stood or milled around, creating a very different dynamic than we find in todays churches, where people are expected to spend most of their time sitting.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

No matter that patriotism is too often the refuge of scoundrels. Dissent, rebellion, and all-around hell-raising remain the true duty of patriots.

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.

I dont 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.

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.

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 its intimate and psychological-resistant to generalization a mystery of the individual soul.

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.

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 peoples, then that must feel pretty good.

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.

Like many other women, I could not understand why every man who changed a diaper has felt impelled, in recent years, to write a book about it.

Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.

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.