Top 50 Arlie Russell Hochschild Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Most women work one shift at the office or factory and a ‘second shift’ at home.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

2. “Many working families are both prisoners and architects of the time bind in which they find themselves.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

3. “Compared with the employed, the jobless are less likely to vote, volunteer, see friends and talk to family. Even on weekends, the jobless spend more time alone than those with jobs.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

4. “Each marriage bears the footprints of economic and cultural trends which originate far outside marriage.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

5. “And were in the middle of a perfect storm. These days, government social services are being bad-mouthed and defunded. The non-profit world is looking more and more like the for-profit world. The growing gap between rich and poor makes most of us very anxious about where we stand.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

6. “Here is a new car, a new iPhone. We buy. We discard. We buy again. In recent years, we’ve been doing it faster.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

7. “In response to our fast-food culture, a ‘slow food’ movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

8. “We, on both sides, wrongly imagine that empathy with the “other” side brings an end to clearheaded analysis when, in truth, it’s on the other side of that bridge that the most important analysis can begin.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

9. “An empathy wall is an obstacle to deep understanding of another person, one that can make us feel indifferent or even hostile to those who hold different beliefs or whose childhood is rooted in different circumstances.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

10. “If the power elite want to forget about pollution, and if they impose structural amnesia on a community, you need an omnipotent mind to remember how things once were. You needed, the Arenos felt, God.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

11. “Fox News stokes fear. And the fear seems to reflect that of the audience it most serves – white middle- and working-class people.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

12. “To televisionize any serious problem, the program directors face the task of making the message ‘go down smooth’ until the audience is delivered to the commercial.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

13. “Children born of married parents in America face a higher risk of seeing them break up than children born of unmarried parents in Sweden.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

14. “The more anxious, isolated and time-deprived we are, the more likely we are to turn to paid personal services. To finance these extra services, we work longer hours. This leaves less time to spend with family, friends and neighbors; we become less likely to call on them for help, and they on us.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

15. “Blacks, women, immigrants, refugees, brown pelicans – all have cut ahead of you in line. But it’s people like you who have made this country great. You feel uneasy. It has to be said: the line cutters irritate you. They are violating rules of fairness. You resent them, and you feel it’s right that you do. So do your friends. Fox commentators reflect your feelings, for your deep story is also the Fox News deep story.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

16. “If love is a precious resource, it is not one simply extracted from the Third World and implanted in the First; rather, it owes its very existence to a particular cultural alchemy that occurs in the land to which it is imported.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

17. “In the life of one man, Lee Sherman, I saw reflected both sides of the Great Paradoz – the need for help and a principled refusal of it.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

18. “Our polarization, and the increasing reality that we simply don’t know each other, makes it too easy to settle for dislike and contempt.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

19. “The right seeks release from liberal notions of what they should feel – happy for the gay newlywed, sad at the plight of the Syrian refugee, unresentful about paying taxes. The left sees prejudice.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

20. “The influx of women into paid work and her increased power raise a woman’s aspirations and hopes for equal treatment at home. Her lower wage and status at work and the threat of divorce reduce what she presses for and actually expects.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

21. “The Arenos felt that their silent bayou, their buried kin, their dead trees were forgotten, like the female half of the Nuer. Coming.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

22. “And the Republican Party especially associates the market with the idea of progress, goodness, family, and points us toward the mall as an answer to all our personal dreams.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

23. “But in Louisiana, the Great Paradox was staring me in the face – great pollution and great resistance to regulating polluters.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

24. “The surface of American life looks smooth, prosperous, peaceful. But underneath, fault-line shifts in family and work life have led us into what some have called ’advanced insecurity.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

25. “As one man explains, “A lot of us have done okay, but we don’t want to lose what we’ve got, see it given away.” When I ask him what he saw as being “given away,” it was not public waters given to dumpers, or clean air give to smoke stacks. It was not health or years of life. It was not lost public sector jobs. What he felt was being given away was tax money to support non-working people and non-deserving people – and not just tax money, but honor too.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

26. “In 1960, when a survey asked American adults whether it would “disturb” them if their child married a member of the other political party, no more than 5 percent of either party answered “yes.” But in 2010, 33 percent of Democrats and 40 percent of Republicans answered “yes.” In fact, partyism, as some call it, now beats race as the source of divisive prejudice.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

27. “A political campaign has a central place in the cultural life of a people. It tells citizens what issues powerful people think are worth hearing about.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

28. “Many workers in the petrochemical plants were conservative Republicans and avid hunters and fishers and felt caught in a terrible bind. They loved their magnificent wilderness. They remembered it as children. They knew it and respect it as sportsmen. But their jobs were in industries that polluted – often legally – this same wilderness.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

29. “Conservatives of yesterday seem moderate or liberal to us today.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

30. “Three factors – the belief that child care is female work, the failure of ex-husbands to support their children, and higher male wages at work – have taken the economic rug from under that half of married women who divorce.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

31. “Could it be, I wonder, that there is such a thing as a wantologist, someone we can hire to figure out what we want? Have I arrived at some final telling moment in my research on outsourcing intimate parts of our lives, or at the absurdist edge of the market frontier?”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

32. “Many women cut back what had to be done at home by redefining what the house, the marriage and, sometimes, what the child needs. One woman described a fairly common pattern: I do my half. I do half of his half, and the rest doesn’t get done.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

33. “Part of the psychological program is that people think they’re free when they’re not,” he said. “A company may be free to pollute, but that means the people aren’t free to swim.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

34. “The basic feeling around town was that one shouldn’t get too hung up on the environment, feel too nostalgic for cleaner times, or be too retro; that wasn’t what residents were ‘supposed to feel.’ That’s because a fracking boom was on, and many new industries were on their way to Lake Charles to process the natural gas it freed from the cracked earth.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

35. “The more at risk a person is to exposure to hazardous waste, nationwide, we discovered, the less likely a person was to be worried about it, and the more likely to be a conservative Republican.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

36. “But if we get our souls saved, we go to Heaven, and Heaven is for eternity. We’ll never have to worry about the environment from then on. That’s the most important thing. I’m thinking long-term.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

37. “Left or right, we all happily use plastic combs, toothbrushes, cell phones, and cars, but we don’t all pay for it with high pollution. As research for this book shows, red states pay for it more – partly through their own votes for easier regulation and partly through their exposure to a social terrain of politics, industry, television channels, and a pulpit that invites them to do so. In one way, people in blue states have their cake and eat it too, while many in red states have neither.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

38. “Just 158 rich families contributed nearly half of the $176 million given to candidates in the first phase of the presidential election of 2016 – $138 million to Republicans and $20 million to Democrats.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

39. “The English language doesn’t give us many words to describe the feeling of reaching out to someone from another world, and of having that interest welcomed. Something of its own kind, mutual, is created. What a gift. Gratitude, awe, appreciation; for me, all those words apply and I don’t know which to use. But I think we need a special word, and should hold a place of honor for it, so as to restore what might be a missing key on the English-speaking world’s cultural piano. Our.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

40. “Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

41. “If, in 2010, you lived in a county with a higher exposure to toxic pollution, we discovered, you are more likely to believe that Americans “worry too much” about the environment and to believe that the United States is doing “more than enough” about it. You are also more likely to describe yourself as a strong Republican.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

42. “Templet refers me to a 1992 study by the MIT political scientist Stephen Meyer, who rated the fifty states according to the strictness of their environmental protection. Meyer then matched regulatory strictness to economic growth over a twenty-year period and found that the tougher the regulation, the more jobs were available in the economy.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

43. “Issued in February 2012, and still online as of May 5, 2016, the report was written by one set of state officials for another. After a chilling description of a “cancer slope factor,” the report continues, in a matter-of-fact tone, to advise the recreational fisherman on how to prepare a contaminated fish to eat: “Trimming the fat and skin on finfish, and removing the hepatopancreas from crabs, will reduce the amount of contaminants in the fish and shellfish,” the document reads.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

44. “Many of the young aspire to happy marriages and dot-com fortunes but end up in guarded love and okay-for-now jobs.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

45. “If in previous decades large historic events drew people together and oriented them toward collective action, the recent double trend toward greater choice but less security leads the young to see their lives in more individual terms. Big events collectivize. Little events atomize.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

46. “They had children to take care of and felt wary of supporting any environmental movement or federal government action that might jeopardize them.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

47. “Virtually every Tea Party advocate I interviewed for this book has personally benefited from a major government service or has close family who have.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

48. “The Righteous Mind, for example, Jonathan Haidt.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

49. “In a racially separated world, it’s possible to have racial disadvantage without racial prejudice. Whites can turn for help to white neighbors with good connections in the plant. Blacks turn to black neighbors without them.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild

50. “Tea Party advocates work in or run small businesses. Yet the politicians they support back laws that consolidate the monopoly power of the very largest companies that are poised to swallow up smaller ones.”

— Arlie Russell Hochschild