black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

What would it mean in practice to eliminate all the ‘negative people’ from one’s life [as demanded by motivational speaker J.P. Maroney]? It might be a good idea to separate from a chronically carping spouse, but it is not so easy to abandon the whiny toddler, the colicky infant, or the sullen teenager.

Barbara Ehrenreich

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

Bankers Lucky Thieves
we are reaching the point, if we have not passed it already, where the largest public housing program in America will be our penitentiary system.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Country Pass Prison Program Reach
while everything else in our lives has gotten simpler, speedier, more microwavable and user-friendly, child-raising seems to have expanded to fill the time no longer available for it.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Children Friendly Live Our
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better mousetrap, or the contemporary equivalent, can expect to be harassed by strangers demanding that you read their unpublished manuscripts or undergo the humiliation of public speaking, usually on remote Midwestern campuses.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

Innovation Public Speaking Stranger
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

Culture Fire Shapes
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

Catholic Rejection Thinking
Transcendent Oneness does not require self-examination, self-help, or self-work. It requires self-loss.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Loss Oneness Self
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

Absurd Health House Job Jobs Once Support
Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Elderly Hate People
Cheerfulness, up to and including delusion and false hope, has a recognized place in medicine.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

False Hope Medicine Pain
Some people make stuff; other people have to buy it. And when we gave up making stuff, starting in the 1980s, we were left with the unique role of buying… We’ve shopped till we dropped alright, face down on the floor.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

People Roles Unique
Money does not bring happiness’ – only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Absence Endure Happiness Money
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

Expectations Police Poverty
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

Men Narcissistic Results
in our culture, the professional, and largely white, middle class is taken as a social norm – a bland and neutral mainstream – from which every other group or class is ultimately a kind of deviation.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Class Taken White
The war with Iraq … had to be one of the greatest non sequiturs in military history. Attacked by a gang composed largely of Islamic militants from Saudi Arabia, the United States countered by invading an unrelated country, and one of the most secular in the Middle East at that.
BARBARA EHRENREICH

Country Military War

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes