There seems to be no stopping drug frenzy once it takes hold of a nation. What starts with an innocuous HUGS, NOT DRUGS bumper sticker soon leads to wild talk of shooting dealers and making urine tests a condition for employment—anywhere.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Drugs
America is addicted to wars of distraction.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: War
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
Topics: Compassion
If that’s how it all started, then we might as well face the fact that what’s left out there is a great deal of shrapnel and a whole bunch of cinders (one of which is, fortunately, still hot enough and close enough to be good for tanning).
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Universe, The Universe
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
Topics: Twentieth Century
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
Topics: Patriotism
We who officially value freedom of speech above life itself seem to have nothing to talk about but the weather.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Speech
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
Topics: Autobiography, Legacy
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—resistant to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Criminals, Crime
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
Topics: Creation
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
Topics: Television
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
Topics: Marriage, Husbands
No culture on earth outside of mid-century suburban America has ever deployed one woman per child without simultaneously assigning her such major productive activities as weaving, farming, gathering, temple maintenance, and tent-building. The reason is that full-time, one-on-one child-raising is not good for women or children.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Mothers
Surely there must be some way to find a husband or, for that matter, merely an escort, without sacrificing one’s privacy, self-respect, and interior decorating scheme. For example, men could be imported from the developing countries, many parts of which are suffering from a man excess, at least in relation to local food supply.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Relationships
Those Romans who perpetrated the rape of the Sabines, for example, did not work themselves up for the deed by screening Debbie Does Dallas, and the monkish types who burned a million or so witches in the Middle Ages had almost certainly not come across Boobs and Buns or related periodicals.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Pornography
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
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
Topics: Science Fiction
Marriage is socialism among two people.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Marriage, Reputation
Someone has to stand up for wimps.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Men
If men were equally at risk from this condition – if they knew their bellies might swell as if they were suffering from end-stage cirrhosis, that they would have to go nearly a year without a stiff drink, a cigarette, or even an aspirin, that they would be subject to fainting spells and unable to fight their way onto commuter trains – then I am sure that pregnancy would be classified as a sexually transmitted disease and abortions would be no more controversial than emergency appendectomies
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Pregnancy
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
Topics: Language
Natural selection, as it has operated in human history, favors not only the clever but the murderous.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Evolution
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
Topics: Innovation
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
Topics: Children
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
Topics: Mothers
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
Topics: Work
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
Topics: Women, Men, Men & Women
Heads of state are notoriously ill prepared for their mature careers; think of Adolf Hitler (landscape painter), Ho Chi Minh (seaman), and our own Ronald Reagan.
—Barbara Ehrenreich
Topics: Politics, Politicians
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
Topics: Bureaucracy
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
Topics: Value, Men
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Jane Addams American Social Reformer
- Joyce Carol Oates American Novelist
- Cynthia Ozick American Novelist, Essayist
- Nora Ephron American Filmmaker
- Dave Barry American Humorist
- Linus Pauling American Scientist, Peace Activist
- Gore Vidal American Novelist
- Katherine Anne Porter American Writer
- Alice Walker American Novelist, Activist
- Andre Norton American Science Fiction Writer
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