Top 150 Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “In fact, if you’re not prepared to die when you’re almost sixty, then I would say you’ve been falling down on your philosophical responsibilities as a grown-up human being.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

52. “Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

53. “According to Wal-Mart expert Bob Ortega, Sam Walton got the idea for the cheer on a 1975 trip to Japan, “where he was deeply impressed by factory workers doing group calisthenics and company cheers.” Ortega describes Walton conducting a cheer: “‘Gimme a W!’ he’d shout. ‘W!’ the workers would shout back, and on through the Wal-Mart name. At the hyphen, Walton would shout ‘Gimme a squiggly!’ and squat and twist his hips at the same time; the workers would squiggle right back.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

54. “Get up and make notes on the books that you have, reflect on these notes and order more books, get up again, revise the hypothesis, and figure out a new plan of action. Repeat, making sure to leave no cracks open through which the gray fog of depression can penetrate.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

55. “Warriors make wars, but it is also true that, in what has so far been an endless reproductive cycle, war makes warriors.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

56. “If God cares about our puny species, then disasters prove that he is not all-powerful; and if he is all-powerful, then clearly he doesn’t give a damn.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

57. “Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

58. “If there is a lesson here it has to do with humility. For all our vaunted intelligence and complexity, we are not the sole authors of our destinies or of anything else. You may exercise diligently, eat a medically fashionable diet, and still die of a sting from an irritated bee. You may be a slim, toned paragon of wellness, and still a macrophage within your body may decide to throw in its lot with an incipient tumor.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

59. “The Republican Party: a few million gun-toting, Armageddon-ready Baptists.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

60. “I believe nothing. Belief is intellectual surrender; “faith” a state of willed self-delusion.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

61. “Lenders, including major credit companies as well as payday lenders, have taken over the traditional role of the street-corner loan shark, charging the poor insanely high rates of interest.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

63. “Marriage is socialism among two people.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

64. “Americans love marriage too much. We rush into mariage with abandon, expecting a micro-Utopia on earth. We pile all our needs onto it, our expectations, neuroses, and hopes. In fact, we’ve made marriage into the panda bear of human social institutions: we’ve loved it to death.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

65. “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

66. “You can and should use logic and reason all you want. But it would be a great mistake to ignore the stray bit of data that doesn’t fit into your preconceived theories, that may even confound everything you thought you were sure of.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

67. “Given the cultural barriers to intersex conversation, the amazing thing is that we would even expect women and men to have anything to say to each other for more than ten minutes at a stretch.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

68. “The label of liberalism is hardly a sentence to public ignominy: otherwise Bruce Springsteen would still be rehabilitating used Cadillacs in Asbury Park and Jane Fonda, for all we know, would be just another overweight housewife.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

69. “The psychological trauma of losing a job can be as great as the trauma of a divorce. It creates a lot of anger and emotional hardship. People may become quite depressed.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

70. “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

71. “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

72. “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.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

73. “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

74. “Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

75. “Every time a bank swoops down to snatch up a home, it should be met with a crowd of jeering, obstructive neighbors. And although this may be point 4.5, how about organizing a mass refusal to pay back student loans?”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

76. “Sometimes we need to heed our fears and negative thoughts, and at all times we need to be alert to the world outside ourselves, even when that includes absorbing bad news and entertaining the views of “negative” people.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

77. “Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

78. “Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

79. “I was an answer-seeking machine, in love with what I called “the truth,” whether it came in the form of little truth particles stuck to the pages of books or vast patterns screaming out from the obvious and mundane.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

80. “Labor is like motherhood to most of our political leaders: a calling so fine and noble that it would be sullied by talk of vulgar, mundane things like pay.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

81. “That’s what science is about: seeing the exact same things that other people do, finding the units of measurement with which to describe those things, communicating in the fewest and most precise words available. What could be saner – or more sociable – than that?”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

82. “My aim here was much more straightforward and objective – just to see whether I could match income to expenses, as the truly poor attempt to do every day. Besides, I’ve had enough unchosen encounters with poverty in my lifetime to know it’s not a place you would want to visit for touristic purposes; it just smells too much like fear.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

83. “Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

84. “The internet was supposed to make this whole business of job searching rational and simple. You could post your resume and companies would search them and they’d find you. It doesn’t seem to work that way. There aren’t enough jobs for experienced, college educated managers and professionals.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

85. “It is the marketplace that calls most clearly for men to be softer, more narcissistic and receptive, and the new man is the result.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

86. “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

87. “That’s the really neat thing about Dan Quayle, as you must have realized from the first moment you looked into those lovely blue eyes: impeachment insurance.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

88. “Considering the absence of legal coercion, the surprising thing is that men have for so long, and, on the whole, so reliably, adhered to what we might call the breadwinner ethic.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

89. “Upscale young men seem to go for the kind of woman who plays with a full deck of credit cards, who won’t cry when she’s knocked to the ground while trying to board the six o clock Eastern shuttle, and whose schedule doesn’t allow for a sexual encounter lasting more than twelve minutes.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

90. “To fight against a war or, better yet, an entire “war machine,” we had to become warriors ourselves. This is the cunning symmetry of war: Enemies tend to come to resemble one another. And this was perhaps especially so in a culture that appallingly – to us – applied the war meme to just about anything, as in the “War on Poverty.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

91. “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

92. “You still don’t like the idea of gay marriage? Then, as my friend the economist Julianne Malveaux says: Don’t marry a gay person. Case closed, problem solved.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

94. “With his long hair, his hints of violence, and his promise of ecstasy, Dionysus was the first rock star.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

95. “I think it’s tragic that we have this human capacity, which appears to be hardwired, or so the evolutionary biologists say, for collective joy. We have these techniques for generating it that go back thousands of years, and yet we tend not to use this.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

96. “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

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

98. “Once you do lose a job, there are not a lot of social supports for you. You lose health insurance because we have this absurd system in America where health insurance is usually tied to employment. Your income dips. And that’s when you get into selling the house.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

99. “From an entertainment point of view, the Solar System has been a bust. None of the planets turns out to have any real-estate potential, and most of them are probably even useless for filming Dune sequels.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

100. “Poor whites had always had the comfort of knowing that someone was worse off and more despised than they were; racial subjugation was the ground under their feet, the rock they stood upon, even when their own situation was deteriorating. That slender assurance is shrinking.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich