quotes by Barbara Ehrenreich

"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 (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America)

"Of all the nasty outcomes predicted for women's liberation...none was more alarming than the suggestion that women would eventually become just like men."
— Barbara Ehrenreich

"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

"I was raised the old-fashioned way, with a stern set of moral principles: Never lie, cheat, steal or knowingly spread a venereal disease. Never speed up to hit a pedestrian or, or course, stop to kick a pedestrian who has already been hit. From which it followed, of course, that one would never ever -- on pain of deletion from dozens of Christmas card lists across the country -- vote Republican. "
— Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Nickel and Dimed On (Not) Getting By in America"
— Barbara Ehrenreich

""The urge to transform one's appearance, to dance outdoors, to mock the powerful and embrace perfect strangers is not easy to suppress." --Barbara Ehrenreich, Dancing in the Streets, 260."
— Barbara Ehrenreich

"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 (Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America)

"But the economic meltdown should have undone, once and for all, the idea of poverty as a personal shortcoming or dysfunctional state of mind. The lines at unemployment offices and churches offering free food includes strivers as well as slackers, habitual optimists as well as the chronically depressed. When and if the economy recovers we can never allow ourselves to forget how widespread our vulnerability is, how easy it is to spiral down toward destitution."
— Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)

"Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss."
— Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)

"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

"For all the talk about the need to be a likable "team player," many people work in a fairly cutthroat environment that would seem to be especially challenging to those who possess the recommended traits. Cheerfulness, upbeatness, and compliance: these are the qualities of subordinates -- of servants rather than masters, women (traditionally, anyway) rather than men. After advising his readers to overcome the bitterness and negativity engendered by frequent job loss and to achieve a perpetually sunny outlook, management guru Harvey Mackay notes cryptically that "the nicest, most loyal, and most submissive employees are often the easiest people to fire." Given the turmoil in the corporate world, the prescriptions of niceness ring of lambs-to-the-slaughter."
— Barbara Ehrenreich (Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream)