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 EHRENREICHCrime 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, a mystery resist to generalization, a mystery of the individual soul.
More Barbara Ehrenreich Quotes
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Medical debts are the number-one cause of bankruptcy in America.
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The fact is that heterosexual sex for most people is in no way free of the power relations between men and women.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Sometime in the eighties, Americans had a new set of ‘traditional values’ installed. … the poor and the middle class were shaken down, and their loose change funneled blithely upwards to the already overfed.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Roman Catholicism: a hundred million people bowing down before a flesh-hating, elderly celibate.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
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 -
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 -
Consider the standard two-person married couple. … They will share a VCR, a microwave, etc. This is not a matter of ideology or even personal inclination. It is practically the definition of marriage. Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
if you search the bible, you will find no reference to birth control or gay marriage, and you will not find a word, strangely, about stem cell research. I have searched.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Call it ‘nationalism’ when you affix a flag to your car, and leave the word ‘patriotism’ for your efforts to make this country a kinder, more egalitarian place, and one that is less dangerous to the rest of the world.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Poverty is not a character failing or a lack of motivation. Poverty is a shortage of money.
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Marriage is socialism among two people.
BARBARA EHRENREICH -
Money does not bring happiness’ – only the wherewithal, perhaps, to endure its absence.
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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.
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Exercise is the yuppie version of bulimia.
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When I was born, my father was a copper miner in Butte, Montana. It was a hard-core, blue-collar situation.
BARBARA EHRENREICH






