Top 150 Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes (2025 Update)

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

2. “I’m not a nice person.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

3. “There is a vast difference between positive thinking and existential courage.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

4. “The ‘working poor,’ as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

5. “If there is no God or no evidence of God and certainly no evidence of a very morally engaged god, then whatever has to be done has to be done by us.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

6. “Employers have gone away from the idea that an employee is a long-term asset to the company, someone to be nurtured and developed, to a new notion that they are disposable.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

8. “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

9. “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

10. “Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

11. “Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

12. “When you watch television, you never see people watching television. We love television because it brings us a world in which television does not exist.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

13. “Racist, sexist, and homophobic thoughts cannot, alas, be abolished by fiat but only by the time-honored methods of persuasion, education and exposure to the other guy’s-or excuse me, woman’s-point of view.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

14. “To live in poverty is to live with constant uncertainty, to accept galling indignities, and to expect harassment by the police, welfare officials and employers, as well as by others who are poor and desperate.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

15. “There are no secret economies that nourish the poor; on the contrary, there are a host of special costs. If you can’t put up the two months’ rent you need to secure an apartment, you end up paying through the nose for a room by the week. If you have only a room, with a hot plate at best, you can’t save by cooking up huge lentil stews that can be frozen for the week ahead. You eat fast food or the hot dogs and Styrofoam cups of soup that can be microwaved in a convenience store.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

16. “In economics, we borrowed from the Bourbons; in foreign policy, we drew on themes fashioned by the nomad warriors of the Eurasian steppes. In spiritual matters, we emulated the braying intolerance of our archenemies, the Shite fundamentalists.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

17. “Once I realized I was old enough to die, I decided that I was also old enough not to incur any more suffering, annoyance, or boredom in the pursuit of a longer life.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

18. “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

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19. “Wars produce warlike societies, which in turn make the world more dangerous for other societies, which are thus recruited into being war-prone themselves.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

20. “We need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

21. “When someone works for less pay than she can live on – when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently – than she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made of a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

22. “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, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

23. “Our space was a home because we loved each other in it.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

24. “What you don’t necessarily realize when you start selling your time by the hour is that what you’re really selling is your life.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

25. “You can think of death bitterly or with resignation, as a tragic interruption of your life, and take every possible measure to postpone it. Or, more realistically, you can think of life as an interruption of an eternity of personal nonexistence, and seize it as a brief opportunity to observe and interact with the living, ever-surprising world around us.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

27. “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

28. “I complain to one of my fellow servers that I don’t understand how she can go so long without food. “Well, I don’t understand how you can go so long without a cigarette,” she responds in a tone of reproach. Because work is what you do for others; smoking is what you do for yourself.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

29. “Call it ‘nationalism’ when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word ‘patriotism’ for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

30. “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

31. “Middle-class-led reform movements, from the Progressive Era to the War on Poverty, have been marred by an elitist distance from the would-be beneficiaries of reform.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

32. “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

33. “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

34. “Frankly, I adore your catchy slogan, “Adoption, not Abortion,” although no one has been able to figure out, even with expert counseling, how to use adoption as a method of birth control, or at what time of the month it is most effective.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

35. “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.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

36. “We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

37. “People who just pretend to have a positive attitude may be more acceptable, but they will still attract according to how they are really vibrating- the energy they are emanating will attract their circumstances.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

38. “We spend so much time scrambling from one thing to the next, getting through it, getting to the end, and starting over again, that I would not forget to fully breathe in the miniscule moments of beauty and peace.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

39. “For anyone worn down, The Impossible Will Take a Little While is a bracing double cappuccino.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

40. “The media have just buried the last yuppie, a pathetic creature who had not heard the news that the great pendulum of public consciousness has just swung from Greed to Compassion and from Tex-Mex to meatballs.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

41. “Feminists have not tried to “destroy the family”. We just thought the family was such a good idea that men might want to get involved in it too.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

42. “The “discovery” of poverty at the beginning of the 1960s was something like the “discovery” of America almost five hundred years earlier. In the case of each of these exotic terrains, plenty of people were on the site before the discoverers ever arrived.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

43. “The truth is, many things are worth doing only in the most slovenly, halfhearted fashion possible, and many other things are not worth doing at all.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

44. “But who could resist the erotic lives of atoms and molecules – the violent passion of electrostatic attractions, the comfortable mutuality of covalent bonds, the gentle air kisses of van der Waals forces? The rules governing the couplings and uncouplings of tiny particles seemed to me as fascinating as the kinship rules of what we still called “primitive” societies – with the revulsion of like-charged particles, for example, functioning as a kind of incest taboo.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

45. “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

46. “To be homeless in America is to live like a fugitive. The destitute are our own native-born “illegals.””

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

48. “When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

49. “I smoke. It’s expensive. It’s also the best option. You see, I am always, always exhausted. It’s a stimulant. When I am too tired to walk one more step, I can smoke and go for another hour. When I am enraged and beaten down and incapable of accomplishing one more thing, I can smoke and feel a little better, just for a minute. It is the only relaxation I am allowed.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

50. “Yes, I think especially the Pentecostal churches, you know, that there’s been such a growth in Pentecostalism. And it’s a rejection of the much more dour and barren kind of Calvinist worship and also, the very formal Catholic forms of worship.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich