Top 150 Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes (2024 Update)
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101. “Whenever people can access deities directly without the intervention of a religious hierarchy, they don’t need to have hierarchy so much.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

102. “Even when uttered by Democrats, “middle class” often sounds like a mealymouthed way of saying, “Us, and not them,” where “them” includes poor people, snake handlers and those with pierced tongues.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

103. “It was a real surprise to me to come across the evidence that Christianity might once have been a danced religion. Certainly, some of the early church leaders thought this was great and spoke of what seems to have been circle dancing, perhaps around an altar.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

104. “In fact, there is clear evidence of black intellectual superiority: in 1984, 92 percent of blacks voted to retire Ronald Reagan, compared to only 36 percent of whites.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

105. “It’s even occurred to me, as a teeny little subversive whisper of a thought, that if we stop mowing the lawn right now, it will probably be a long, long time before the yard gets overrun by lions and snakes.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

106. “An asteroid could hit us at any moment. This is not – and also, the most successful kind of life on this planet is not us, it’s microbes. They’re the ones who greatly outnumber us, and may eventually destroy us.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

107. “For the millions of us who live glued to computer keyboards at work and TV monitors at home, food may be more than entertainment. It may be the only sensual experience left.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

108. “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

109. “Experimental science is fascinating, but I don’t want to do it. I want other people to do it, and I’ll read about it.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

110. “People tend to judge presidents on how the economy performs, and yet we don’t expect them to have the power to do much about it. Or we don’t want them to exercise that power, if they were to have it.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

111. “To this day, and no doubt for good reasons, suffering remains the almost exclusive preoccupation of professional psychology. Journals in the field have published forty-five thousand articles in the last thirty years on depression, but only four hundred on joy.40.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

112. “Personally, I can’t see why it would be any less romantic to find a husband in a nice four-color catalogue than in the average downtown bar at happy hour.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

113. “Purge everyone who “brings you down,” and you risk being very lonely or, what is worse, cut off from reality.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

114. “You can talk about depression as a “chemical imbalance” all you want, but it presents itself as an external antagonist – a “demon,” a “beast,” or a “black dog,” as Samuel Johnson called it. It could pounce at any time, even in the most innocuous setting.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

115. “Individually the poor are not too tempting to thieves, for obvious reasons. Mug a banker and you might score a wallet containing a month’s rent. Mug a janitor and you will be lucky to get away with bus fare to flee the crime scene.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

116. “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

117. “A cynic might conclude that the real purpose of the $500 million-a-year implant business is the implantation of fat in the bellies and rumps of underemployed plastic surgeons.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

119. “I had discovered that writing – with whatever instrument – was a powerful aid to thinking, and thinking was what I now resolved to do.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

120. “That’s free enterprise, friends: freedom to gamble, freedom to lose. And the great thing – the truly democratic thing about it – is that you don’t even have to be a player to lose.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

121. “America is addicted to wars of distraction.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

122. “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

123. “As anyone knows who has ever had to set up a military encampment or build a village from the ground up, occupations pose staggering logistical problems.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

— Barbara Ehrenreich

125. “No one should be incarcerated for debt or squeezed for money they have no chance of getting their hands on.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

126. “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

127. “Well I do think there are people who are habitually negative and depressed and take the opposite approach because they imagine the worst, and their minds become dominated by that. They let their own emotions and expectations transform their perceptions of the world.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

128. “The flip side of positivity is thus a harsh insistence on personal responsibility: if your business fails or your job is eliminated, it must because you didn’t try hard enough, didn’t believe firmly enough in the inevitability of your success.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

129. “Somehow human authority is never enough; we must have special effects.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

130. “Anyone who has invented a better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

131. “Very often in a classroom or a conversation I feel like yelling, ‘What difference does it make?’ Because 94% of my life is occupied with utter trivia. Much of my rebelliousness starts with indifference to what is urgently important to others.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

132. “You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there’s no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

133. “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

134. “Imagine spending four billion years stocking the oceans with seafood, filling the ground with fossil fuels, and drilling the bees in honey production – only to produce a race of bed-wetters!”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

135. “So great was the witches’ knowledge that in 1527, Paracelsus, considered the “father of modern medicine,” burned his text on pharmaceuticals, confessing that he “had learned from the Sorceress all he knew.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

136. “Ineluctably, the insults inflicted in one war call forth new wars of retaliation, which may be waged within months of the original conflict or generations later.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

137. “A thing cannot be conscious without having agency, but it can have agency without being conscious.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

138. “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.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

139. “Why shouldn’t our “great chain of being” include the other creatures with which we have shared the planet, the creatures we have martyred in service to us or driven out of their homes to make way for our expansion?”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

140. “But our culture is in truly bad shape if we have come to define respecting something as the failure to set it on fire.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

141. “The nation was not founded by habitual groupthinkers. But it stands a fair chance of being destroyed by them.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

142. “The Republicans hardly need a party and the cumbersome cadre of low-level officials that form one; they have a bankroll as large as the Pentagon’s budget, dozens of fatted PACs, and the well-advertised support of the Christian deity.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

143. “In today’s world, other people have become an obstacle to our individual pursuits.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

144. “Life” is of course a misnomer, since viruses, lacking the ability to eat or respire, are officially dead, which is in itself intriguing, showing as it does that the habit of predation can be taken up by clusters of molecules that are in no way alive.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

145. “Six witnesses affirmed that Jacoba had cured them, even after numerous doctors had given up, and one patient declared that she was wiser in the art of surgery and medicine than any master physician or surgeon in Paris. But these testimonials were used against her, for the charge was not that she was incompetent, but that – as a woman – she dared to cure at all.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

146. “My Turn is the distilled bathwater of Mrs. Reagan’s life. It is for the most part sweetish, with a tart edge of rebuke, but disappointingly free of dirt or particulate matter of any kind.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

147. “We do not look into mirrors, for example, to see our “true” selves, but to see what others are seeing, and what passes for inner reflection is often an agonizing assessment of how others are judging us.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

148. “The advice that you must change your environment – for example, by eliminating negative people and news – is an admission that there may in fact be a “real world” out there that is utterly unaffected by our wishes. In the face of this terrifying possibility, the only “positive” response is to withdraw into one’s own carefully constructed world of constant approval and affirmation, nice news, and smiling people.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

149. “It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the Earth can sustain.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich

150. “It seems to me that there must be an ecological limit to the number of paper pushers the earth can sustain, and that human civilization will collapse when the number of, say, tax lawyers exceeds the world’s total population of farmers, weavers, fisherpersons, and pediatric nurses.”

— Barbara Ehrenreich